'At a distance from the scene of the atrocity'

Edgar Allan Poe's intervention into the hysteria surrounding Mary Rogers's murder takes a perspective of rational detachment, which is largely responsible for the story's reputation as an awkward or unwieldy work of fiction. From early in 'The Mystery of Marie Roget', Edgar Allan Poe erects an architecture of narrative estrangement that prevents the reader from identifying with the characters or from grieving for Roget's awful death. Although the story initially appeared in Snowden's Ladies' Companion, it begins with a lengthy metaphysical German epigraph attributed, in a footnote, to Novalis. Poe's use of 'ideal' is curiously mathematical rather than aesthetic. His account of the murder stresses logic, reason and facts, releasing the story from the overwrought emotional turbulence of the original version. The story, Poe tells reader, 'was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded'.