Charles Edward Mudie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charles Edward Mudie (October 18, 1818 - October 28, 1890), English publisher and founder of Mudie's Lending Library, was born at Chelsea, the son of a second-hand bookseller and newsagent.
In 1840 he established a stationery and book-selling business in Bloomsbury. He was the first publisher of James Russell Lowell's poems in England, and of Emerson's Man Thinking.
In 1842 he began to lend books, charging subscribers one guinea per year for the right to borrow one volume of a novel at a time. This department proved so successful that in 1852 he moved his "Select Library" to larger premises in New Oxford Street, London. The cost of novels in the Victorian era was such that most middle-class English people could not afford to purchase novels privately, so lending libraries like "Mudie's" had a strong influence over publishers and authors. The rise of the three-volume novel can be directly attributed to this influence, and Mudie's refusal to stock "immoral" books, such as, George Moore's A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummers Wife (1885) and A Drama in Muslin (1886), also had an effect on the direction of Victorian literature.
In 1860 the company's New Oxford Street premises were substantially enlarged, and new branches of the business were subsequently established in other English cities such as York, Manchester and Birmingham. In 1864 Mudie's was converted into a limited company. The decline of Mudie's eventually came as a result of the rising number of government-funded public libraries, which offered similar services at a much reduced rate.
[edit] Sources
- Trafficking In Literary Authority: Mudie's Select Library And The Commodification Of The Victorian Novel, L Roberts - Victorian Literature and Culture, 2006 - Cambridge Univ Press
- A Victorian Leviathan: Mudie's Select Library, Guinevere L. Griest, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 20, No. 2, 103-126. Sep., 1965
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
 This European business-related biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
