The “pleasant satire” of which the Sun spoke was evidently meant to hold up to view the craze of the day for speed in the transmission of news and men. Yet the Sun itself, as the leader of penny journalism, had been to a great extent the cause of this craze. It had taught the people to read the news and to hanker for more.
There was another story which Poe and the Sun shared—one that will outlive even the balloon hoax. Almost buried on the third page of the Sun of July 28, 1841, was this advertisement in agate type:
Left her home on Sunday morning, July 25, a young lady; had on a white dress, black shawl, blue scarf, Leghorn hat, light-colored shoes, and parasol light-colored; it is supposed some accident has befallen her. Whoever will give information respecting her at 126 Nassau shall be rewarded for their trouble.
The next day the Sun said in its news columns:
☞ The body of a young lady some eighteen or twenty years of age was found in the water at Hoboken. From the description of her dress, fears are entertained that it is the body of Miss Mary C. Rogers, who is advertised in yesterday’s paper as having disappeared from her home, 126 Nassau Street, on Sunday last.
The fears were well grounded, for the dead girl was Mary Cecilia Rogers, the “beautiful cigar-girl” who had been the magnet at John Anderson’s tobacco-shop at Broadway and Duane Street; the tragic figure of Poe’s story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” a tale which served to keep alive the features of that unsolved riddle of the Elysian Fields of Hoboken. To the Sun, which had then no Poe, no Sherlock Holmes, the murder was the text for a moral lesson:
There can be no question that she had fallen a victim to the most imprudent and reprehensible practise, which has recently obtained to a considerable extent in this city, of placing behind the counters and at the windows of stores for the sale of articles purchased exclusively by males—especially of cigar-stores and drinking-houses—young and beautiful females for the purpose of thus attracting the attention, exciting the interest (or worse still), and thus inducing the visits and consequent custom, of the other sex—especially of the young and thoughtless.
It was by being placed in such a situation, in one of the most public spots in the city, that this unfortunate girl was led into a train of acquaintances and associations which has eventually proved not only her ruin, but an untimely and violent death in the prime of youth and beauty. From being used as an instrument of cupidity—as a sort of “man-trap” to lure by her charms the gay and giddy into the path of the spendthrift and of constant dissipation—she has become the victim of the very passions and vices which her exposure to the public gaze for mercenary gain was so well calculated to engender and encourage.
The Sun and the other papers might have pursued the Mary Rogers mystery further than they did had it not been that in a few weeks a more tangible tragedy presented itself, when John C. Colt, a teacher of bookkeeping, and the brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor, killed Samuel Adams, one of the leading printers of New York. Adams had gone to Colt’s lodgings at Broadway and Chambers Street to collect a bill, and Colt, who had a furious temper, murdered him with a hammer, packed the body in a box, and hired an innocent drayman to haul it down to the ship Kalamazoo, for shipment to New Orleans. This affair drove the Rogers murder out of the types, and left it for Poe to preserve in fiction with the names of the characters thinly veiled and the scene transferred to Paris.
The great social event of the town in 1842 was the visit of Charles Dickens. He had been expected for several years. In fact, as far back as October 13, 1838, the Sun remarked: