From a Norfolk childhood to the newspaper press
Rogers was born at Holt, Norfolk, in 1823. His father disappeared during his childhood, leaving his mother, a Wesleyan Methodist, to support them partly by keeping a small school. At Gresham’s grammar school he received a classical education, but remembered harsh punishment and the difficulty of learning Latin rules by rote. Shorthand became a more practical interest, eventually connecting his early employment with a career in journalism.
After an apprenticeship to a chemist and work as a druggist, he became a surgeon’s dispenser in Wolverhampton in 1845. A shorthand-writing friend helped him obtain newspaper work at the Staffordshire Mercury. In 1848 he took charge of the Norfolk News in Norwich. His recollections describe visiting estates to report on the poor housing of agricultural labourers.
In 1870 he started the Eastern Counties Daily Press for the Norfolk News proprietors; the following year it became the Eastern Daily Press. He moved to London in 1873 to establish the National Press Agency with Liberal support, supplying material to newspapers around the country. He had married Sophia Jane Hawkes in 1843, and they had two sons and four daughters. She died in 1892; he died at Finchley in 1910 after a prolonged illness.
Religious change and organised Spiritualism
Rogers’s relationship with Isaac Pitman began through shorthand. It also helped redirect his religious life: troubled by the Wesleyan account of the Atonement, he found relief in the Swedenborgian teaching to which Pitman introduced him. He later experimented with mesmerism and came to interpret the reported visions of an invalid friend, identified in his memoir as Miss A., as evidence of a spiritual world.
