Prologue:The Mary Rogers Tragedy

Abstract JN September 1841, Lydia Maria Child, the celebrated writer and JL abolitionist, visited the scene of what she and others described as the ̎Mary Rogers Tragedy.̎ The event she referred to was the mysterious death of Mary Cecilia Rogers, a young woman of New York City who had mysteriously disappeared on a hot Sunday in late July from the boardinghouse she ran with her elderly mother on Nassau Street, in the heart of the city. More commonly known as the ̎Beautiful Cigar Girl̎ when she had tended the counter at John Anderson’s popular cigar store, her body, badly bruised and waterlogged, had been found three days later, floating in the shallow waters of the Hudson River just a few feet from the shore, near Hoboken, New Jersey. Standing at this site, ̎the beautiful promontory near Sybil̕s cave where her body was found half in and half out of the water,̎ just a few weeks after the death, Child was struck by the beauty of the setting and overwhelmed by a complex mixture of thoughts, feelings, and associations.