“Who Murdered Mary Rogers?”: police reform, abortion, and The criminalization of private life

Abstract Constance Shirley, a character in Ned Buntline’s 1848 novel, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, is horrified when she reads in the morning Herald that a body “has been found in the water.” It is the body of Mary Sheffield, also known as “The Beautiful Cigar Girl,” and one of the novel’s central characters. The newspaper asserts that Mary had been the victim of “ill treatment and murder by a gang of rowdies at Hoboken.” But Buntline soon reveals to Constance what his readers already know: that “the marks of violence upon her [were] inflicted not by a gang of rowdies, but by a hag: a she devil, an abortion of her own sex, one of whom it would be blasphemy to call a woman, [the abortionist] Caroline Sitstill.” Sitstill, Buntline’s readers also knew, was a stand-in for Madame Restell, the period’s most infamous abortionist. In this novelization the fictive Mary Rogers has died from an abortion, a “still and lost treatment” intended to end her unwanted pregnancy, the result of a seduction by Constance’s own father, the prosperous merchant, Albert Shirley.