The Stillwater Tragedy was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. in 1880. The novel is set in a fictional New England manufacturing town and combines two plots: a murder mystery (who killed old Doolittle, found dead on the first page?) and a social drama about a strike at the town’s marble quarry and the tensions between workers, owners, and the community that depends on both.
The murder plot provides narrative momentum, but the novel’s real interest is the labor conflict. Aldrich portrays both sides with some sympathy: the workers have legitimate grievances about wages and conditions; the owner, Slocum, is neither villainous nor enlightened but simply a businessman trying to maintain profitability. The union organizer, Torrini, is an outsider (an Italian immigrant) whose radicalism threatens the fragile social consensus of the town.
Aldrich’s political sympathies are ultimately conservative — the strike is portrayed as destructive, the union as susceptible to manipulation by demagogues, and the resolution involves the workers accepting compromises — but the novel is not a simple polemic. It registers the genuine human cost of industrial capitalism and the impossibility of returning to pre-industrial social arrangements.
The book was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and attracted attention for its engagement with contemporary social issues — the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was fresh in memory, and labor conflict was the dominant domestic issue of the era.
Collecting The Stillwater Tragedy
First edition (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1880): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40