At the dawn of Monday, 17 June 1872, within the single room occupied by the Rogers family in Bermondsey, an eight-year-old girl was awakened by her mother’s voice. “Eliza, your father has cut my throat!” she later recounted before the court. The mother, Sarah Margaret Rogers, had left the bed and reached the threshold, clad only in her nightdress, wounded in the neck; her three-year-old son was covered in blood. James Daniel Rogers, a barber, stood by the mantelpiece, himself wounded in the throat. Inside the chamber, a blood-stained razor lay near the bed.
The scene appeared to demand a simple explanation. None was forthcoming. Sarah accused her husband; he affirmed that she had inflicted the wound upon herself, and had subsequently cut him. The medical practitioners did not merely debate the severity of the wounds: at trial, the question of Rogers’s state of mind led the jury to refuse a conviction for murder and to order his detention as a lunatic. The record thus preserves two separate inquiries—that of the physical act and that of criminal responsibility—without allowing the legal outcome to be mistaken for a contemporary medical diagnosis.
The family was poor and lodged in a single ground-floor room in the house of Robert Doffy, at 11 William’s Terrace, off Blue Anchor Road. James earned his living as a hairdresser. His wife, Sarah, and their two children shared this narrow tenement with him. Doffy, together with a waiter named George Dight, occupied rooms above. Both had heard the couple quarrel on previous occasions; neither claimed to have followed every dispute or to have understood its cause. Doffy observed that they could also appear comfortable and quiet together.
The evening of Sunday, 16 June, had even seemed peaceable to several witnesses. The young girl remembered an excursion to Victoria Park with her parents and her little brother. Yet her testimony was no clock. She first placed their departure at about five o’clock; under cross-examination, she spoke of roughly eight. She stated that they returned at about eleven, whereas Doffy, who had encountered them in the park, parted from the group around nine and came home near midnight. He saw them afterwards in their room, with no outward sign of discord. The trial did not wholly reconcile these discrepancies of time; what it established with greater certainty was that, a few hours after their return, the house was aroused by cries.
The child explained that after supper she had laid herself down upon the floor, beside the bed where her parents lay with the little boy. She was asleep when she heard her mother cry out that her father had cut her throat. She had not witnessed the stroke. Upon waking, she saw her father place the razor upon the table; her mother was rising from the bed, blood upon her nightdress. The accusation came from Sarah; Eliza spoke only of the moments following the outcry.
Doffy heard a shriek around half-past two. He called down the stairs to Rogers, receiving no answer. Sarah called for assistance, repeating that he had cut her throat; the little girl opened the door and ran out, saying the same. Doffy saw the husband standing near the fireplace, and the woman advancing toward the doorway. There she swooned. The neighbour went in search of a constable and a surgeon, then returned to the room where Dight was holding Rogers down upon a chair. He saw blood on the floor and across the bed. The waiter heard the man insist that his wife had cut herself before turning upon him. Dight stated that he saw the razor lying closed and bloody near the bed; the child, for her part, believed she had seen her father lay it open upon the table.
When Mr. Joseph Moore, the surgeon, arrived, he first examined the injuries. That of Rogers, upon the neck, was of no serious consequence; Sarah’s was grave. Both were conveyed to Guy’s Hospital. The house-surgeon, George David Deeping, described in the woman a deep incision, which had divided the internal jugular vein and laid bare the external carotid artery. She lingered ten days after the assault, expiring on 27 June. Deeping ascribed her death to pyaemia—that is, a blood infection supervening upon the wound. The trial thus did not treat her as having been killed outright: the medical fate of the case unfolded during her treatment within the hospital ward.
From her bed, Sarah maintained her accusation. The record contains a sworn declaration taken by a magistrate while she believed herself to be dying. In it, she stated that she had raised herself slightly to disengage her arm from the little boy, whereupon she felt her husband’s arm about her neck; she stated that she called out to her daughter, and presently found herself upon the threshold. She recounted further that he had bidden her be quiet and had denied having injured her. Yet she affirmed that they had returned from the park without a quarrel, had supped together, and that for several months past she had believed something was wrong with her husband’s mind. She acknowledged, for her part, having once cut him on the wrist with a small table knife during a former altercation. These words were to be read in court after her death; they were not the living deposition of a witness before the jury.
The dating of this declaration demands caution. The transcript records a formal heading assigning it to 23 June, whereas George Hankinson, who took down the answers in writing, stated that he accompanied the magistrate to the hospital on the 24th, between twelve and one o’clock. The text does not resolve this internal contradiction. It alters neither the date of the wound nor that of the demise, established otherwise through testimony, but it forbids assigning an indisputable day to the taking of the statement.
The indictment charged wilful murder. For the defence, conducted notably by Montagu Williams, it was necessary to examine the mental condition of the prisoner. His brother, William Rogers, related that he had found him strange for months past: in the shop, Rogers would occasionally leave a customer half-shaved, forgetting what he was about; he would repeat the same phrases and blundered in the practice of his trade. The brother also recalled an assault, seven years earlier, in which Rogers had been robbed and struck upon the head. He believed he had appeared singular ever since that injury.
The same brother spoke of the domestic strife, Rogers’s suspicions regarding his wife’s absences, and the quarrels concerning their marriage. In particular, he recounted offers of money said to have been made to Sarah by another man: this was his brother’s account, not that of the man himself. He stated that Rogers had relinquished his own barber’s shop in the spring and was now working for him. Dr. David Roberts had, some months earlier, attended the prisoner following an excessive bout of drinking, finding him exhausted and in a nervous state that led him to fear delirium tremens. Yet drunkenness and insanity were not confounded in the proceedings.
Mr. Moore, the surgeon, questioned upon the subject of “homicidal mania,” conceded that a morbid impulse might, in his opinion, drive a man to slay one he loved, and that a head injury might predispose to mental disorder. Yet he had observed nothing in Rogers to suggest he was out of his mind when he dressed his wound. Dr. John Rowland Gibson, the surgeon of the gaol, offered testimony adverse to the defence: having observed the prisoner daily since his arrival at Newgate, he considered him sane and stated he had detected no delusions. Mr. Deeping, the hospital house-surgeon, had likewise received coherent and sensible answers from him, noticing nothing singular during his care. These observations, however, did not encompass the precise moment of the attack.
The jury had heard the eccentricities described by the brother, the history of an old blow to the head, and the general hypotheses of the medical men regarding morbid impulses. Yet Moore, Deeping, and Gibson had detected no insanity in Rogers during their examinations. Roberts’s testimony pertained to an earlier episode of collapse brought on by drink. On 19 August 1872, the jury returned a verdict finding Rogers not guilty on the ground of insanity. The court ordered that he be detained until Her Majesty’s pleasure should be known. This was neither a conviction followed by an ordinary sentence, nor an acquittal pronounced because the deed had not occurred. The verdict defined the legal category to which the jurors assigned the prisoner; it does not in itself provide a diagnosis that modern medicine could adopt.
Here the record closes. It does not reveal what subsequently became of Rogers, nor how the two children were cared for. It leaves a woman dead ten days after receiving her wound, a young girl who witnessed only the aftermath of an act she did not see, and two irreconcilable accounts within a cramped room. The verdict, therefore, did not flow from a unanimous medical finding of insanity. It brings the recorded proceedings to a close, without unravelling the particular reasons that led the jurors to this conclusion.