This week online there has been some hot drama about a book that came out today. Literary twitter is abuzz. I will write more about it behind the paywall on Friday where it is safe (lol). But for today, I want to talk about some HOT DRAMA from 1868, and a very public literary feud between two very prominent literary women.
Mary Abigail Dodge died famous. After two strokes at the age of 66, Dodge died at home in Massachusetts and was celebrated nationwide. Newspapers from New York to California and across the Atlantic wrote multi column obituaries celebrating her life and career. She was beloved. Upon her death, The World newspaper wrote that, “she was eccentrically clever, virile, and outspoken. If there was a burden upon her mind, she freed it in a fashion liable to consequence, and when the consequence came she was girt to meet it.”
Dodge is an easy character to like. She was the seventh child, and became a writer by necessity. As a young woman, she made an investment in wool manufacturing happening in the West that didn’t pan out. Instead of cutting her losses, Dodge investigated. She did interviews and pulled transcripts and wrote a book about the scam of the wool trade in the West that brought her attention and notoriety and a national column. After that she wrote about everything. She was deeply political. She fought against slavery, for women’s independence from men, for the reformation of the criminal justice system, and she was absolutely obsessed with money.
A Boston Globe article in 1878 about America’s five most famous Marys (i do not know what to tell you) wrote that she, “has learned to talk as few women can talk; has made herself a power in Washington society; and is the envy of many younger and fairer women who find that neither bright eyes nor Worth dresses avail to make their circle of admirers as large as that which gathers around the dark-eyed, vivacious little lady who is not afraid to own to her forty years.”
Mary Abigail lived most of her life in Hamilton, Massachusetts. At the time, Boston was the second major hub for publishing and she spent a lot of time there. In particular, she spent a lot of time at the home of Annie Fields.
Now Annie Fields and Mary Abigail Dodge were good friends. They were the same age, both writers, and both advocates for women’s literature. Later, Annie Fields would live with another writer Sarah Orne Jewett for years in what I personally believe was a romantic relationship. So take that for what you will. At the time of Dodge and Fields’ friendship, though, Fields was married and her husband was one of the most powerful literary men in America. Mr. James Thomas Field was Mary Abigail Dodge’s publisher.
The Fields were a kind of literary industry power house. Annie wrote poetry, memoirs, and biographies. James was a big deal publisher. They hosted parties at their house in the posh Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston just two blocks from the park. They befriended authors. They plucked young promising new literary icons from the slush pile. They were powerful and rich and very, very well connected. They hosted literary salons at their home that featured big ass American writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Here is what Dodge later wrote, “My dealings with Mr. [Field], and the business aspect of our connection came to be nearly lost sight of behind the veil of friendship. Money arrangements I left entirely to him. I never stipulated for anything […] He accordingly paid me whatever he chose, and I was entirely satisfied.”
Or at least she was for a little while. For four years and two books, Mary Abigail Dodge was satisfied. She was friends with her publisher, she slept in his guest room. She was involved and beloved in the literary community, and then something happened. In 1868 The Congregationalist published an article titled “Pay of Authors,” which posited that the average royalty payment for books was 10%. Mary Abigail Dodge looked at her pay stubs, did the math, and realized she was making 15 cents per book sold (closer to 7%).
So she did what any reasonable author would do: she asked James Fields what was up. And he ignored her.
Now James Fields was very, very good at his job. Ticknor & Fields was one of the biggest publishing houses in America and Fields was its literary head. Hawthorne (a friend of his) said he owed all of his success to Fields. He was known in the industry as especially shrewd and smart. At this time, it was still common for the marketing of books to exist solely on bribery, and Fields was good at it. He was also famous for being able to determine which book a shopper would buy within 10 minutes of their entry into his publisher’s corner bookstore. He would later claim that the reason Adams got paid less than average was because more money was spent on marketing and promoting her book (bribes), but he never provided any evidence of that (whether or not it was true.)
Mary Abigail, feeling wronged, did what she always did, and reported. She found that Sophia Hawthorne (Nathaniel’s widow) was also having trouble. She reached out to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She contacted other publishers and found that the article was correct. 10% was the average. And realizing that she was right she cut the Fields out of her life entirely and abruptly. She later wrote:
How many of the writers who had received reduced pay had really and intelligently agreed to it, and how many had found it, like greatness, thrust upon them, and had accepted it on the representation of its being universal, rather than make an ado and appear churlish?
The drama, though, went on for months. How embarrassing this must have been for the Fields in the beginning. Their whole THING was being popular with authors and here was one of their most famous kicking up a whole storm. Plus they were very wealthy. And wealthy people have a kind of blindness that prevents them from understanding that, for other people, money does not just appear.
“I really thought she cared for me! And now to find it was a pretense or a stepping-stone merely is something to shudder over. And all for a little of this world’s poor money!!” Annie Adams Fields wrote in her diary after the breakup.
Over a period of two years, Dodge regained her publishing rights, extracted herself from her contract, and went immediately to another publisher where she did the truly ballsy thing and immediately published a book called A Battle of the Books which laid an extremely thin veil over her entire experience and published every minute detail of it.
Her publisher included a note about how the manuscript just arrived on his desk. How strange. In fact in the editor’s Introduction says
“No longer do authors shamelessly drink toasts to the despotic emperor to whose thousand crimes is linked the one virtue of having hanged a bookseller. On the contrary, they raise their harps and join voices to sing their benefactor's praise. Who has not seen in all the newspapers the affecting tale of the great house of Fields, Osgood, & Co.,—nomen clarum et venerabile,—on whom has fallen the mantle of Ticknor & Fields?”
And then Dodge spends 300 pages writing a story about someone who is definitely not her having a remarkably similar time with a publisher who will not pay her enough.
Here is the conclusion of that book:
To their credit, the Fields must have had very good PR people because neither of them every said a public word. With the exception of Annie’s diary entry, there is no other record of their response to this book that I could find. Sure, reviewers called the book needy and desperate and pathetic. Even some of Dodge’s friends told her not to publish it. The Fields, they said, were too powerful.
But Mary Abigail Dodge won. Her new publisher gave her more than 10%, and A Battle of The Books went through three full printings.