It was an astonishing gambit. At the time of the murder, Poe had been enjoying a rare interlude of prosperity as an editor of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, an illustrated monthly journal. He had followed the details of the Mary Rogers case with great care, and is even said to have been a patron of Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium, where the cigar girl had worked. Poe’s tenure at Graham’s marked a brief period of calm in an otherwise turbulent career. In spite of his obvious gifts as a poet and short story writer, Poe had a constant struggle to cobble together a living and was often reduced to begging for loans from sympathetic friends such as
Snodgrass. Whatever small reputation he enjoyed rested chiefly on his work as a literary critic, a field in which he displayed great sensitivity and insight, but also a ruthlessness that earned him many enemies. Much of Poe’s greatest work had already been written at the time of the cigar girl’s death, but fame and creative freedom continued to elude him. “I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance),” he wrote, “but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves.”
“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” he hoped, would change all that. Poe’s groundbreaking story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which introduced the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, had appeared in Graham’s in April 1841, about two months before the Mary Rogers murder. Poe presented Dupin as a reclusive, brilliant figure, shuttered away in his dimly lit chamber, venturing out only at night to prowl the streets of Paris and enjoy the “infinity of mental excitement” afforded by his powers of observation. The story anticipated virtually every convention of what would become the modern mystery story—the brooding, eccentric sleuth; the comparatively dense sidekick; the wrongfully accused suspect; the unlikely villain; the false clue; and—perhaps above all—the impossible, locked-room crime. Today the story stands as a literary milestone—the genesis of the entire crime fiction genre—but its original publication drew only scant notice. By the following year Poe had left Graham’s and his fortunes had taken a precipitous downward turn. Casting about for an idea he could sell, Poe decided to apply Dupin’s powers of “ratiocination,” or deductive reasoning, to a real-life puzzle, transforming the murder of Mary Rogers into “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”
Seldom have a writer and his subject been better suited to one another. Poe’s entire life had been shadowed by the deaths of the women who were closest to him, beginning with his own mother, who died of tuberculosis when her son was not yet three years old. As Poe sat down to write “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” his own wife, Virginia, had entered the early stages of the same disease, beginning a long and agonizing decline. For Poe, these losses were not only the tragedy of his life but also the wellspring of his art, unleashing the seemingly limitless tide of melancholy from which he brought forth his most memorable heroines—Helen, Lenore, Madeline Usher, Annabel Lee, and countless others.
“The death…of a beautiful woman,” Poe once wrote, “is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” In the saga of Mary Rogers, Poe appeared to have found a young woman culled from one of his own works. The victim was not only young and beautiful, but an aura of melancholy and injustice hung over the crime. Poe’s ambitions for the story were enormous: “I have handled my design in a manner altogether novel in literature,” he told Joseph Snodgrass. “I have imagined a series of nearly exact coincidences occurring in Paris. A young grisette [working-class girl], one Marie Rogêt, has been murdered under precisely similar circumstances with Mary Rogers. Thus, under pretence of showing how Dupin unravelled the mystery of Marie’s assassination, I, in reality, enter into a very long and rigorous analysis of the New York tragedy. No point is omitted. I examine, each by each, the opinions and arguments of the press upon the subject, and show that this subject has been, hitherto, unapproached. In fact, I believe not only that I have demonstrated the fallacy of the general idea—that the girl was the victim of a gang of ruffians—but have indicated the assassin in a manner that will give renewed impetus to investigation.”
Poe’s confident tone could not conceal the desperation of his circumstances. Having set a price of forty dollars for his story, he ended his letter on a plaintive note: “Will you write me upon this point?—by return mail, if possible.” As it happened, Snodgrass showed no interest in “Marie Rogêt,” and the story went instead to a magazine called the Ladies’ Companion, a publication Poe had previously derided for its “ill-taste and humbuggery.” Even so, Poe had reason to feel hopeful about the prospects for “Marie Rogêt.” He had given close scrutiny to the many twists and turns of the Mary Rogers saga, and constructed a solution that seemed both gripping and plausible. Even more intriguing was the manner in which Dupin, Poe’s fictional detective, had reached his conclusions—“sitting steadily in his accustomed armchair,” trusting solely to the power of ratiocination. “I feel convinced,” Poe said, “that the article will excite attention.”
Due to the unusual length of “Marie Rogêt,” the editor of the Ladies’ Companion chose to publish the story in three sections over the course of three monthly issues. Poe may have hoped that spacing the installments out in this manner would help to heighten the suspense, and spark the public’s interest in Dupin’s unraveling of the case in the final pages. But the first two installments of “Marie Rogêt” had already appeared when new and disturbing evidence surfaced in the case of Mary Rogers’s murder, and the investigation that had been dormant for several months broke open once again.
The third and final installment of “Marie Rogêt,” containing Poe’s carefully reasoned elucidation of the case, was only days away from publication. With a solution to the real-life mystery now appearing close at hand, and with his deadline looming, Poe took a desperate gamble. His efforts to save his story and his reputation were both brilliant and wildly audacious, and form an emblematic chapter of his life. By the time he finished he had not only recaptured the story but bent it to his will.
Henry James once offered a blunt and telling remark when comparing Poe to the French poet Charles Baudelaire: “Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two,” James observed, “as well as the greater genius.” Both aspects of Poe’s character, the genius and the charlatan, came into play as he grappled with “Marie Rogêt.” At times, Poe veered from one to the other within the space of a single sentence, with extraordinary flashes of inspiration set off by an equal measure of guile. The result was a unique form of alchemy, transforming fact into fiction and back again. For Poe, Mary Rogers marked the point at which life and art converged. At a time when his own life was collapsing, her story offered a form of solace, a chance to emulate his famous detective and find order in chaos. In the process, he rewrote history—his own as well as that of the cigar girl—and found poetry in the heart of a murder.
PART ONE
Her Dark Smile
“You would be exposed to the gaze of every creature…”
—Sunday Morning Atlas (New York)
September 13, 1840
Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society
The annals of crime are gorged with mysteries. The red band of murder has set its mark on many of its pages, but left no other sign of its identity. Of all the episodes enshrouded in this somber incompleteness, there is none more tantalizing than the case of Mary Cecilia Rogers.
—The New York Police Gazette, 1881
The true genius shudders at incompleteness—and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
—Edgar Allan Poe
I
A Gallant Gay Lothario
FROM THE FRONT STOOP of the Rogers boardinghouse at 126 Nassau Street, one could see a great deal of New York City. At the time Nassau Street had been dubbed “the city’s brain” for its many newspaper and publishing offices, “pulsating ever with the beating of a printing engine,” though there were still some in the neighborhood wh
o recalled a quieter era when the cobblestone street was known simply as “the road that runs by the pie-woman’s.”
To the north, only a few hundred yards away, stood the imposing bulk of City Hall, faced in Massachusetts marble and topped with an ornate dome that later proved to be highly flammable. At the rear of the building, the gleaming marble gave way to Newark brownstone, reflecting a shortage of funds during construction, and a belief, at the time of its completion in 1812, that the city was unlikely to grow much beyond Chambers Street.
Across the southern tip of City Hall Park stood the Astor House Hotel, a Greek Revival structure said to be the “grandest mass” in town. When the hotel opened in 1836, entrepreneur John Jacob Astor had been roundly criticized for putting his hotel in such a remote location. Astor’s pioneering spirit soon paid off as the neighborhood flourished, and the hotel rapidly became the most fashionable address in the nation. Chief among its luxuries was running water, pumped by steam and available to each of its 309 rooms, even those on the fifth floor. At the palatial restaurant on the ground level, hotel guests and local businessmen could choose from some thirty menu selections each day, ranging from oyster pie and honeyed gammon to roast wild duck and game pudding.
A few blocks north, on land that had once been a freshwater pond, stretched the warren of narrow, muddy streets known as Five Points, notorious as the world’s worst slum. At its heart, amid a scattering of slaughterhouses, glue factories, and turpentine distilleries, stood a dilapidated tenement called the Old Brewery, the most densely occupied building in the city, where hundreds of immigrants and wage laborers lived in conditions of unrelieved squalor. Five stories tall, the brewery also featured a “Murderer’s Alley,” where the city’s “blackest hearts” were known to gather. “It is a region of wickedness, filth and woe,” wrote the Reverend Matthew Hale Smith. “Lodging-houses are under ground, foul and slimy, without ventilation, and often without windows, and overrun with rats and every species of vermin. Bunks filled with decayed rags make the beds.…Rooms are rented from two to ten dollars a month, into which no human being would put a dog. Children are born in sorrow, and raised in reeking vice and bestiality, that no heathen degradation can exceed. The degraded women who tramp the streets in the viler parts of the city, who fill the low dance houses and drinking-saloons, graduate in this vile locality.”
For those who preferred more wholesome entertainments, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum—around the corner from the Rogers boardinghouse—formed the center of a growing entertainment district. Visitors thrilled to such star attractions as the “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, the “tiny and terrific” General Tom Thumb, and the exotic “Wondrous Mermaid from Feejee.” For the admission price of twenty-five cents, visitors could also see jugglers and ventriloquists, bearded ladies and rubber men, fire-walkers, sword-swallowers, and dozens of other “varied entertainments of the most dazzling sort.” Barnum had seized on a location on Broadway at Ann Street—convenient to both good and bad neighborhoods—in the hope that “high and low alike” would pass beneath his brightly striped awnings. “Mr. Barnum’s rule has been to give all who patronize him the worth of their money,” declared the New York Sun, “without being particular as to the means by which he attracts the crowd to his exhibitions. While these special features may not be all that the public expect, every visitor gets the worth of his money ten times in the immense amount of amusement that cannot be secured anywhere else.”
John Anderson’s cigar store at 319 Broadway also benefited from canny promotion and a prime location, north of City Hall at Pearl Street. A statue of Sir Walter Raleigh beckoned to passersby, while gold lettering above the door listed the various items on offer, including “seegars, fine cut & confections.” Anderson made a particular specialty of fine cut, or chewing tobacco, in the days when using a cuspidor, rather than the floor, was considered a mark of breeding. When General Winfield Scott visited the store and praised Anderson’s tobacco as a “great solace” to the fighting man, Anderson hit on the idea of packaging individual chaws in bright foil wrappers. “Anderson’s Solace Tobacco” stayed fresh and slipped easily into the pocket, making it ideal for use by soldiers in the Mexican-American War or by gold miners in California. The inspiration would bring Anderson a fortune.
A man of tremendous energy and ambition, Anderson saw the tobacco business as a path to better things, possibly even a career in politics. Born in 1812, Anderson began his working life as a laborer in a wool-pulling plant, and later apprenticed as a bricklayer to a master mason who noted the young man’s promise and helped secure his start in the cigar business. Within a few months Anderson was becoming one of the city’s leading merchants, and even his competitors marked him as a man of promise.
Thanks to its convenient location, Anderson’s emporium soon came to serve an informal “back parlor” function, where patrons from the nearby newspaper and government offices mingled on a footing that could be either social or professional, as the occasion required. Powerful newspaper editors such as Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant were regular customers, along with the great jurist and judge James Kent and James K. Paulding, the secretary of the navy. New York’s literati also brought their custom to Anderson’s, many of them drifting over from the nearby Shakespeare Tavern, at the corner of Nassau and Fulton, which had long been a second home to the city’s poets and writers. Both Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were frequent customers, and it is often said that the twenty-eight-year-old Edgar Allan Poe, who came to New York from Richmond in 1837, occasionally dropped in to rub elbows with the luminaries.
To Anderson’s chagrin the store also proved popular with less desirable elements, notably the rough “young sports” who pursued women and games of chance with equal vigor. Anderson worried that lower-class patrons would muddy his political chances. Occasionally he could be heard making disparaging remarks about the “soaplocks and rowdies” cluttering up his shop. This drew a sharp rebuke from a newspaper called the Whip, whose editor wondered if “a certain biped of segar notoriety had not better be a little careful how he utters his imprecations against consumers of that commodity, lest he feel the force of the Whip.”
In his early days as a tobacconist, Anderson could ill afford to give offense. Facing stiff competition from longer-established shopkeepers, the young entrepreneur struggled to gain his footing, and cast about for a means of setting Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium apart from its rivals. The solution arrived in the form of an “ethereal and hypnotically pleasing” young woman named Mary Cecilia Rogers, who would soon be famous throughout the city as “the Beautiful Seegar Girl.”
Born in 1820, Mary Rogers came to New York from Connecticut as a teenager, following her father’s death in a steamship explosion. With money provided by an older brother, Mary and her mother would eventually open a boardinghouse off lower Broadway at 126 Nassau Street, within walking distance of the tobacco emporium.
By her sixteenth birthday, Mary was widely judged to be a great beauty, with one admirer offering a poem to her womanly figure, raven tresses, and “dark smile.” One suitor, who lived for a time at the Rogers boardinghouse, described her as “amiable and pleasing, and rather fascinating in her manners.”
Mary’s attractions were such that in 1838 she came to the attention of John Anderson. Enthralled, he hired her at a generous wage to work behind his cigar counter, where it was thought that her raven tresses and fascinating manners would encourage the male patrons to linger. The hiring of attractive shopgirls, though very much the custom in Europe at the time, was still judged to be somewhat unseemly in America. It was feared that the rough manners of some of the patrons might have a “coarsening” effect on an impressionable young woman. Mary was permitted by her mother, Phoebe Rogers, to accept the position only after securing a promise from Anderson that Mary would never be left alone in the shop, and that she would be escorted home each evening.
Anderson’s interest could not have been entirely altruistic.
From the moment Mary took up her post at the cigar counter, her presence drew throngs of admirers and helped to insure the success of the fledgling business. “At least some of those who frequent Mr. Anderson’s shop,” noted one customer, “have no other object in mind than to preen and squawk before the young lady.” One newspaper likened the effect to that of “a brilliant luminary, to catch the butterflies that love to flutter around so attractive a center.” Anderson’s emporium, which had been in business less than two years, now outpaced its competitors and established its enviable reputation as a literary salon. Along with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, the shop also drew a number of aspiring poets, at least one of whom was inspired to celebrate the beautiful cigar girl in verse:
She’s picked for her beauty from many a belle,
And placed near the window, Havanas to sell
For well her employer’s aware that her face is
An advertisement certain to empty his cases.
Alas! That necessity ever should force
A female to such an unwomanly course;
To make her a magnet to draw in the spooney
The coxcomb and puppy, for sake of their money.
But still, ‘tis our duty in every sphere
That Providence places us, meekly to bear;
And in none upon earth can our honor be stained
If our own self-respect is with firmness maintained.
List not to the flatterer’s vows!—they’re a joke!
Like the weed he is smoking, they’ll all end in smoke;
Reflect on the danger that hems in thy station,
And come out unsullied, exposed to temptation.
The Beautiful Cigar Girl Page 2