Stoddard’s letter has not been found. From January to July 1876 he had been traveling in the eastern Mediterranean; since July he had been in Italy. He supported himself precariously by writing travel letters to the San Francisco Chronicle. He presumably had asked Clemens for financial assistance, or for help in publishing a subscription book of his travel letters, written from Italy and France in 1874–75 or, more recently, from Egypt and the Holy Land (17 Mar 1875 to Stoddard, L6 , 416–18; Austen 1991, 79–82). 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 a lowering of 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 1876). 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 (L3: 19 Aug 1869 to OLL, 306–7 n. 3; 3 Sept 1869 to OLL, 334–35 n. 5; SLC and OLC to Jervis and Olivia Lewis Langdon, 1 April 1870, and “More Wisdom,” enclosed with the letter, L4, 544–47, 104–6).

See 9 Aug 1876 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 : 5 July 1873 to Miller, 398–99; 6 July 1873 to Fairbanks, 403, 408–9 nn. 15–16). Stoddard had probably last been in London in 1875 (Austen 1991, 76–79).