truepenny | UBC: The Murder of Helen Jewett

Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

This is the book I wanted The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers to be. If Helen Jewett had been published first, I would assume that Mary Rogers was an attempt to imitate it, but in fact, Mary Rogers was published in 1995, three years before Helen Jewett.

It's clear that Srebnick and Cline are attempting to do the same thing: to take a cause celebre murder of New York in the mid-nineteenth century and use it to explore the ways in which class and gender roles were being re-formed, and to talk about the rise of sensationalism in both journalism and fiction and its relationship to the naked female corpse.

And it's odd that the book about Mary Rogers was written first, because Helen Jewett is in every way a better fit. All Rogers has going for her, in this context, is Poe's story, "The Murder of Marie Roget." One of the things I complained about when I read Mary Rogers was the lack of primary evidence to back of Srebnick's speculations about Mary Rogers' life and death. Jewett, on the other hand, through a combination of character, circumstance, and coincidence, left a paper trail that is a historian's wet dream. She was a prolific letter writer, and many of her letters were published by the penny press after her murder. The trial got extensive coverage. The fact that her murderer was a young man of good family (nineteen year old Richard P. Robinson, the son of a Connecticut state legislator) and the fact that she had been, before embarking on her career as a prostitute, a maid in the house of a prominent Maine judge (who had sons of the same age as her murderer), meant that a great many men wrote about her (self-servingly, and Cline does a lovely job deconstructing their defensive rhetoric). And as it happens, as the judge's precocious and charming maid, she was mentioned in Anne Royall's Black Book. So it is possible to trace her from her birth as Dorcas Doyen through a series of self-chosen aliases: Maria Stanley, Maria Benson, Helen Mar, and finally, the name she died under at the age of twenty-three, Helen Jewett.

Jewett was murdered in 1836; Rogers in 1841. The treatment of Rogers in the press probably owes a good deal to the sensation surrounding the trial of Jewett's murderer and the way her naked body was described. (Cline also has a much better sense of how to use her primary sources; when she says a source demonstrates something--such as the creepy eroticism with which the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett described Jewett's corpse--she quotes evidence.) Finally, Mary Rogers' death is so mysterious as to be inconclusive, as least as it's presented by Srebnick. Cline, on the other hand, has a murderer and a murder trial--and the grotesque miscarriage of justice by which that murderer was acquitted. (Even aside from the hash the D.A. made of the prosecution . . . since Jewett was murdered in a brothel, the witnesses who place the murderer at the scene, witnesses who corroborate each other's stories, are two white prostitutes, a white brothel owner, and an African-American servant. The D.A. didn't call any of the women's clients as witnesses because those gentlemen begged him not to. The vague and unconvincing testimony that gave Robinson an alibi came from professional-class white men. In his closing remarks, the judge instructed the jury that they had to discount the prostitutes' testimony on the basis that prostitutes "are not to be entitled to credit unless their testimony is corroborated from others, drawn from better sources" (317).)

Cline is a comprehensive and exhaustive researcher; her endnotes contain everything from information on how time was reckoned in 1836 New York to the life and eventual fate of one of Helen's other clients. She explains why she accepts some documents in the case as authentic and discards others as frauds, and her reasons are logical and convincing, and do not rely on "because I want them to be." She is very good at reading against texts, necessary when up to one's chin in the inflated rhetoric of the 1830s, and she uses her evidence to present the best portrait she can of Helen Jewett and her world.

The whole thing is full of fascinating details--Cline is a geek for the history of New York City, which makes the book doubly awesome as far as I'm concerned--but the one I want to offer is about the fate of Helen Jewett's body:

On Monday, Helen Jewett was buried in St. John's Burying Ground, about a mile north of Thomas Street. Bounded by Leroy, Clarkson, Hudson, and Varick (now Seventh Avenue) Streets, the cemetery was associated with St. John's Episcopal Church to the south on Varick. It was the only Episcopal burying ground in active use in the city since an 1831 edict closing off new interments in the overfilled churchyards of Trinity and St. Paul's. Someone [...] approached the rector of St. John's on Sunday or Monday to arrange a plot for the murdered prostitute, paying six dollars for the privilege of Christian burial. [...]

St. John's Burying Ground became Hudson Park in the 1890s, and in turning the land over to the city, the parish advertised widely for anyone with loved ones to reclaim and rebury the bodies interred there; few did. The remaining thousands of bodies and hundreds of monuments were turned under the soil, covered by a formal French park graced with a belvedere overlooking a reflecting pool. The park was renamed James J. Walker Park in the 1940s, in honor of a beloved New York mayor who lived in an 1860s brownstone on Leroy Street across from the site. In 1972, a backhoe transforming the park into a playground ripped into underground crypts that had long been forgotten.

But Helen Jewett did not meet that backhoe. She was not in Walker Park, nor Hudson Park, nor St. John's Burying Ground, not for long anyway. Four nights after her burial, medical students went at her grave with spades and pickaxes, removed her body in a bag, and carted it off for dissection at the College of Physicians and Surgeons on Barclay Street. A short time later, the Herald reported, her "elegant and classic skeleton" hung in a cabinet at the medical school.
(264-65)

Unfortunately, an endnote tells us, if the medical school even still had Jewett's skeleton in the 1860s, it was destroyed in a fire. I love this tangent for what it tells us, both about the city's casual cannibalism of itself from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and about the very specific, ghoulish mise en scène of 1836. And it is typical of the book as a whole.