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).

See 9 Aug 76 to Howellsclick to open link, n. 1.

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).