Charles Edward Mudie

Charles Edward Mudie

Charles Edward Mudie by Frederick Waddy (1872)
Born (1818-10-18)18 October 1818
Chelsea, London
Died 28 October 1890(1890-10-28) (aged 72)
Nationality British
Occupation Publisher, book seller, lending library proprietor

Charles Edward Mudie (18 October 1818, in Chelsea – 28 October 1890), English publisher and founder of Mudie's Lending Library and Mudie's Subscription Library, was the son of a second-hand bookseller and newsagent. Mudie's efficient distribution system and vast supply of texts revolutionized the circulating library movement, while his "select" library influenced Victorian middle-class values and the structure of the three-volume novel. He was also the first publisher of James Russell Lowell's poems in England, and of Emerson's Man Thinking.

Early life

Charles Edward Mudie was born in 1818 to Scottish parents in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. He received most of his education by assisting his father in his newspaper shop until he was twenty-two.[1] In 1840, Mudie opened his first shop on Upper King Street, Bloomsbury.[2]

Mudie's Lending Library

Mudie originally opened his circulating library to give the public greater access to nonfiction works—which took up nearly one third of his stock—but the market value of the novel brought Mudie financial success.[3] In 1842, he began to lend books to students at the University of London, charging subscribers one guinea per year for the right to borrow one volume of a novel at a time.

Expansion

This proved so successful that in 1852 he moved his "Select Library" to larger premises at 509, 510 & 511 New Oxford Street,[4] at its junction with Museum Street and Hart Street, just a few yards south of the British Museum.[5] Mudie's soon had outlets on Cross Street in Manchester and on New Street in Birmingham.

Sketch of the interior of Mudie's Lending Library, 509, 510 & 511 New Oxford Street, London.

London book deliveries were carried out by vans, and the expansion of railroads and trains allowed people to order books across the country. International orders were also issued and shipped abroad in tin boxes.[6] Mudie's also exported books using watertight boxes, some of which were reported to have survived shipwreck.

Mudie was able to offer publishers advance purchase of three or four hundred copies of their new books and obtained corresponding discounts. The company's withdrawn books were offered for sale at £5 for a hundred volumes in 1860.[5]

Censoring Material

Since the cost of novels in the Victorian era was such that most middle-class English people could not afford to purchase novels privately, popular lending libraries like "Mudie's" had a strong influence over the public—and thus over authors and publishers. Mudie's demands that fiction novels be suited to the middle-class family controlled the morality, subject and scope of the novel for fifty years.[7] His "select" books were carefully chosen with these considerations in mind; once the Mudie Library considered a book unfit for its customers, other libraries followed suit. The rise of the three-volume novel can be directly attributed to this influence, and Mudie's refusal to stock "immoral" books and "novels of questionable character or inferior quality",[8] 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.

George Moore criticized the moral and structural power the circulating library system had on literary distribution. His response to censorship was to issue a number of polemics against circulating libraries, the most popular being Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals. He confronted Mudie on why the librarian refused to sell A Modern Lover. Mudie's response:

"Your book was considered immoral. Two ladies from the country wrote to me objecting to that scene where the girl sat to the artist as a model for Venus. After that I naturally refused to circulate your book, unIess any customer said he wanted particularly to read Mr. Moore's novel."[9]

Mudie was also crucial in the success of scientific volumes – In November 1859 he bought 500 copies of the first publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.[10] In fact, much of Darwin's own reading was obtained from Mudie's nonfiction collection. His five-guinea annual subscription allowed him to borrow a parcel of up to six recently published books a month.[11]

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.[nb 1] In 1864 Mudie's was converted into a limited company. [13] On August 18, 1871, directors of Mudie's Select Library (Limited) controlled the English and Foreign Library (formerly known as Hookham's).[14] Mudie's library continued into the 1930s.[15] 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.

Notes

  1. ↑ Competitors of Mudie's in London in the 1870s included circulating libraries of Bolton, Day, Miles, Rolandi, W.H. Smith & Sons, and United.[12]

Sources

Mudies Select Library, illustration in London Society, 1869

Cultural References

· In "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, first produced in 1895, young Cecily Cardew, ward of a well-to-do gentleman living in Hertfordshire, speaking to her teacher Miss Prism about "memory" says that "it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn't possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends to us." Act II, Sc. 1.

In the first of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, 'Can You Forgive Her?', Alice newly arrived at Matching Priory, replies to Jeffrey Palliser:

'"I have amused myself by reading.” “Ah; they never do that here. I have heard that there is a library, but the clue to it has been lost, and nobody now knows the way. I don’t believe in libraries. Nobody ever goes into a library to read, any more than you would into a larder to eat. But there is this difference;—the food you consume does come out of the larders, but the books you read never come out of the libraries.” “Except Mudie’s,” said Alice. “Ah, yes; he is the great librarian.'

References

  1. ↑ Curwen, Henry (1873-01-01). A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New. Chatto and Windus, Publishers.
  2. ↑ London Circulating Libraries, London: The Times, 2 September 1913
  3. ↑ "Mudie's Select Library and the Form of Victorian Fiction". www.victorianweb.org. Retrieved 2015-12-02.
  4. ↑ "London". Hodson's Booksellers, Publishers and Stationers' Directory. London: W.H. Hodson. 1855.
  5. 1 2 Priestland, Neal (2 July 2008). "Bromley House Library 1816 to 1916 "M"". Retrieved 1 January 2011.
  6. ↑ Sutherland, John (2014-10-13). The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-86332-8.
  7. ↑ http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/mudie.html
  8. ↑ Spiegel, Nancy (2011 May). Circulating libraries: library history and architecture. Retrieved from: http://news.lib.uchicago.edu/blog/2011/05/05/circulating-libraries/ (Links to an external site.)
  9. ↑ Moore, George (10 December 1884). "The New Censorship of Literature". Pall Mall Gazette.
  10. ↑ Browne, E. Janet (2002), Charles Darwin: vol. 2 The Power of Place, London: Jonathan Cape, p. 89, ISBN 0-7126-6837-3
  11. ↑ Browne, Janet (2011-05-18). Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-79368-3.
  12. ↑ "Circulating and Lending Libraries", Handbook to London as It Is, London: John Murray, 1879
  13. ↑ Chisholm 1911.
  14. ↑ Guinevere L. Griest (1965). "A Victorian Leviathan: Mudie's Select Library". Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 20. JSTOR 2932540.
  15. ↑ Hendrik Edelman (2001). "Circulating Libraries and Reading Rooms". In David H. Stam. International Dictionary of Library Histories. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. p. 55. ISBN 1-57958-244-3.
Attribution

 Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Mudie, Charles Edward". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Further reading

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