To Charles Warren Stoddard
20 September 1876 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: OFH, UCCL 01366)
(SUPERSEDED)

Hartford, Sept. 20/76

My Dear Stoddard:

We have returned from a 3-months’ absence & find your letter here. I wish I could do what you ask, but I can’t because of constracts & obligations which will absorb every penny for as much as a year to come. I went to Bliss, my publisher, to see if he could do anything, but he shook his head—says he has got more books than customers, & doesn’t want any more of the former. You see I talk plainly, as you ask me to do.—so I know you will take no offense. This recent bust-up in ‸the‸ coal trade hists us pretty hard. My wife’s whole fortune is in coal, & so her income utterly ceases for the next five or six months to come.1 W

I haven’t issued Tom Sawyer here, yet—am waiting for a livelier market. Shall issue right after the Presidential election. Look here; let me suggest something. Hayes will be elected; Hayes has strong literary taste & appreciation; Howells has written Hayes’s biography for campaign purposes;2 Mrs. Howells is Hayes’s own cousin. Suppose you write to me or to Howells & say you want a consulship somewhere, & let us try & see if we can’t manage it. Good men are going to be retained in their consulships, if Grant, through thoughtlessness has appointed any such; but bad ones will be turned out & vacancies ‸be‸ thereby created. If Howells & I got in an early application, we might capture one of those vacancies. If you like the idea, drop us a line. You might mention consulships which you would prefer, but say you’ll take whatever opens up.

You must remember my wife & I ‸me‸ very lovingly to all those excellent Hardys when you write or see them.3

Ys Ever

Mark.

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 Stoddard’s letter does not survive. He presumably had asked Clemens for financial and other assistance in publishing the subscription book he first proposed in February 1875 (see L6, 416–17). Clemens was feeling pressed because of the dissolution, in the summer of 1876, of the monopolistic combination of companies that had controlled coal production and thereby kept prices high. The resultant depression in prices had caused reduction in profits, labor strife with miners who resisted wage reductions, interruptions in mining operations, uncertainty about future production, and consequent anxiety to stockholders, among them Olivia Clemens, who had a substantial interest in her family’s Elmira coal firm, J. Langdon and Company (New York Times, various articles, 23 Aug–18 Sept 76). In 1869 and again in 1870, while editor of the Buffalo Express, Clemens had helped defend Jervis Langdon’s behavior and integrity as a coal company proprietor, in particular rejecting charges that he engaged in monopolistic practices (see L3, 306–7 n. 3, 334–35 n. 5; L4, 105–6, 544–47).

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2 See 9 Aug 76 to Howells, n. 1.

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3 Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, deputy keeper of the English Public Records, his novelist wife, Mary Anne, and their novelist daughter, Iza. The Clemenses had become friendly with them in London in the summer of 1873 (L5, 398–99, 403, 408–9). Stoddard was not in London at this time. To date he had spent 1876 in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Italy, supporting himself precariously with travel letters to the San Francisco Chronicle (Austen 1991, 79–82).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Copy-text:

MS, OFH.

Previous publication:Goodspeed’s catalog, unknown date, partial publication; Davis 1950, 2.

Provenance:Opened in 1916, OFH preserves President Rutherford B. Hayes’s “12,000 volume personal library along with archival material from his military and political career, particularly his presidency, 1877–1881.”