Mudie’s Victorian Mood
What Mudie’s circulating library tell us about the nineteenth-century library world.
In 1842, a young twenty-two-year-old Charles Edward Mudie founded a stationary, newspaper and bookselling business out of 28 Upper King Street (now Southampton Row) in Bloomsbury, London. The youngest of several sons of Scottish parents, he followed in the footsteps of his father, who had also run a small newspaper and stationers shop, where books were loaned by a penny a volume. Unbeknownst to him, Charles Mudie’s business was soon to eclipse his father’s, becoming one of the largest and most popular circulation libraries of 19th century Victorian England, "revolutionizing for several generations at least the whole course and manner of English reading." By 1852, Mudie had moved to a much larger premises at 510 New Oxford Street, from which he continued to expand, opening a prestigious new library and gallery. Accentuated by Ionic columns and pilasters which supported a lantern roof over a round hall, the room holding shelves of books two stories high could only be described as neoclassically ostentatious. These books, however, were not open for browsing—rather they were ordered from a catalogue; Mudie’s Select Library was a warehouse of books, from which members paid an annual subscription fee in order to take them out. This was typical of a circulation library of the time, and the name Mudie and the term circulation library soon became synonymous in the minds of Victorians. By 1890, Mudie’s boasted a remarkable 25,000 subscribers.
Circulation libraries were a hallmark of the 19th century book and library world, and by embarking on an in-depth analysis of this prominent library, Mudie’s reveals much about the era. As primarily a commercial venture, his library soon grew to hold great economic and cultural (near hegemonic) influence in the book lending industry. Through his library, Mudie was able to decide who read, what they read, who was published, what was published, and what other lending businesses had to do in order to survive in the market. The innovative success of Mudie’s Select Library specifically reveals that the 19th century library world revolved around the power of economic capital, allowing cultural control of Victorian values and morals. This will be uncovered through three separate levels of analysis from the individual to the system, investigating in particular the library’s effect on individuals, publishers, and the circulation library market at large.
The historiography on Mudie’s Select Library is relatively sparse. Prominent among the literature is Griest’s preeminent book, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, which eruditely explains the great influence of Mudie’s in deciding how and what authors wrote, particularly in regard to the three volume novel. More recent revisionist scholarship, however, chips away at the general assumptions made by Griest. Eliot, for example, places less emphasis on the three-decker, noting less of a reliance and undervaluing Mudie’s power as primarily a London library. Other publications place more emphasis on how Mudie’s facilitated the rise of the fiction novel and readership of previously marginalised groups like women and children.’ Such criticisms and insights are relevant, and this essay gives such views credence, but argues that, by in large, Mudie’s library effect on the library world was based around its raw economic ability to attract and control individuals, publishers and competing businesses.
Despite greater access to cheap raw materials for print in the 19th century, books were expensive and out of many people’s price range. Britain had traditionally been a high-price culture in regard to books, and although the average cost was beginning to fall by the 1850s, the majority of new books continued to represent a significant investment for the average book-buyer. For someone of the working class on an income of 30s a week, a book of 3s 6d might represent their entire disposable income for that short period of time. Even higher up the social income ladder, books were costly. Reading became an expensive past time defined by economic capital. Circulation libraries provided an alternative to this issue, moving book buying to book lending. Mudie’s, moreover, inventively undercut many competitor libraries with an annual subscription fee of one guinea a year, meaning that a client could potentially read hundreds of books for no more than the cost of two. It was for this reason that circulation libraries—Mudie’s in particular—were so economically sound: the book buying market drove readers who wanted recent novels into the powerful circulation libraries, which also exerted substantial authority in the “Victorian literary milieu”.
Individual and Public
Mudie’s Select Library shows on an individual level how the library world was defined by Victorian values and morals. The use of the label “select” in the libraries name was not accidental, but purposeful, and had obvious implications. Mudie carefully and fastidiously excluded certain books from his library for “moral reasons”, only purchasing books that conformed to Victorian norms. As Griest elaborates, Mudie acted as the “paternal protector” for the reading public, supposing that they would not want books that questioned generally putative Victorian values. Moreover, because his library was so economically viable and popular, Mudie got away with this censorship, and “it controlled the subject, scope, and morality of the novel for fifty years.” Mudie made such control very clear on the second page of the catalogue from 1860:
Cheap reprints, serials, costly books of plates, works of merely professional or local interest, and novels of objectionable character or inferior ability, are almost invariably excluded.
No longer would the head of the family need to waste his time worrying about the right books for his sons and daughters—Mudie had done it for him. His attention to correct and proper books was aimed at providing literature that didn’t corrupt or plague the mind, and perhaps set the stage for how public libraries chose literature further on.
Of particular interest is that Mudie’s paternal ideal also extended to children’s literature. An attribute that set him apart from previous circulating libraries, this microcosm illustrates that Mudie’s was such substantial force in the industry that children’s literature eventually bled into the market. In his examination of children’s literature in circulating libraries between 1748-1848, Grenby notes that “only a very few include more than a handful of children’s books. As a rule, the catalogues contain less than one percent children’s literature." This was for a number of reasons: children’s books were cheaper, and when lent out they were more susceptible to be ripped or completely destroyed. However, upon investigation of Mudie’s catalogues from 1860-1907, it is apparent that children’s literature was an important sector of his business. The 1860 catalogue includes 16 pages of books (roughly 550 titles) encompassed by the “Juvenile Department.” Moreover, by 1907, children’s literature had expanded considerably; this catalogue contains 34 pages (about 2,000 titles) dedicated to children’s books. Rather than the traditional single alphabetical list of offerings, the category “Books for Juvenile Readers” is apportioned five categories: nonfiction, fiction, boys, girls, and young children. Subscribers could be sure that Mudie provided proper and appropriate literature for children, and some of the titles from both catalogues include Charles Dickens’s Christmas Books, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales.
What Mudie’s demonstrates here is that by the middle of the 19th century, libraries were beginning to become more open and accepting of all members of the Victorian family due to their attention to choice and insistence on morality. Children’s literature also provided another form of revenue through specific juvenile subscriptions, increasing economic capital gain. While not every circulating library followed his lead, the popularity of his library certainly shows that his innovation paved the way in the library industry by supervising, but also catering, to the individual.
Publishers and Authors
At the heart of Mudie’s success was the three-volume novel. His insistence on this form clearly demonstrates his library’s economic power. By ensuring publishers produced novels in the form of three volumes, Mudie was able to divide a single novel among three subscribers, tripling his monetary return. Three decker novels were also expensive: novels were priced at 31s 6d for three volumes on the individual buyer’s market. From quite early on, however, Mudie’s entered into a relationship with publishers like Bentley that allowed the three-deckers to be bought in bulk and at a discount: an individual three-decker was priced at the much cheaper value of 15s, or 5s per volume. This was profitable for both the publishers and Mudie’s, and for the next thirty years the library it was half owned by publishers in the form of stocks.
As one might expect, this had important ramifications for publishers and authors. Mudie’s manner of buying books in effect subsidised publishers, and as long as authors conformed to Mudie’s and his audience’s demands, it made it easier for new authors to enter print. Moreover, attaining a spot on the ‘select’ list that Mudie prided himself on had the effect of raising an author’s reputation more efficiently and successfully than by way of the periodical critics. On the other hand, as Marxist Lewis Roberts argues, while authors were approved, credentialed and enabled by Mudie’s, they were also “simultaneously obscured, homogenized, as one of many names/volumes encompassed and assimilated within this voluminous institution.” Along these lines, George Moore exasperatedly claims that Charles Mudie, "not the ladies and gentlemen who place their names on the title-pages, is the author of modern English fiction."
Publishers were also held in this prison of indebtedness to Mudie’s. Due to high prices, the library would habitually rebuff stocking a one-volume first edition or original series. If, however, they were obliged to stock, the library would nevertheless be hesitant to “list, advertise, and circulate the work.” A single publisher, if operating independently, was unlikely to make any headway against the powerful and centralised Mudie’s. Indeed, attempts at lowering the price (2/3rds) of three-deckers by Bentley in 1853 failed, and soon the price returned to its normal, expensive level. Mudie’s was an authoritative force, and although authors and publishers were snarled in its grasp, they also profited from it.
One particular publishing example which Professor Griest provides is that of Garaldine Jewsbury, a reader minor novelist for Bentley from 1860-1875. Jewsbury is relevant as she frequently kept in mind the requirements of Mudie when advising Bentley on whether or not to accept certain novels. Subscribers to the majority of circulating libraries were primarily women—Mudie’s was no exception. Jewsbury capitalised on this, and figured that novels were more likely to attain success when they prominently featured love: bigamous marriages along the “Enoch Arden” theme in which a partner found someone else to love were particularly popular. However, Jewsbury also channelled Mudie’s preferred Victorian values of the time, and noted that each novel needed an optimistic and moral outlook. Exotic settings and stories sympathetic to businessmen were unlikely to find approval. Stories revolving around the upper class and Protestant themes, however, were favoured. Publishers and authors, clearly, were often kept in check by Mudie’s guidelines. They were expected to ‘toe the line’.
Competitors and the Market
Mudie’s Select Library not only effected readers and publishers, but also the library market at large. This was primarily because Mudie managed to undercut competitors with his remarkably low priced subscription. Beyond this, however, Mudie’s success in a voracious market was due to two reasons: advertising and provision. In order to secure and guarantee demand, Mudie advertised widely, listing the latest and most avidly demanded fiction books on offer and the large number of copies available. In doing this, he essentially created something akin to a “best-seller list”, which simultaneously made a market for advertising and firmly established his dominance in making an author’s reputation—and he backed his advertising up. Mudie ordered the most popular books in vast quantities, often grabbing up thousands of volumes and at times even buying up entire printings. Upon examination of the Athenæum in 1860, where Mudie frequently advertised, it is claimed that he had bought 3,000 copies of both McClintock’s Voyage of the Fox and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Although Mudie sometimes overestimated demand, the mass accumulation of in-vogue books insured his power not only with the public and publishers, but also against competitors.
Mudie’s large stocks and advertising meant the public needn’t wait for a book to become available. Despite bitter predictions from older lending establishments, Mudie’s subscriber base actively increased. New branches were opened in Manchester, Birmingham, and London, and arrangements were made to supply provincial libraries and even book clubs and societies. Transport was organised too; instead of a single cart, a full fleet of Mudie vans were “dispatched daily to exchange books at London houses.” Even the most remote parts of England received boxes of books, enabling the country doctor or parson to stay up-to-date on a literary world provided by Mudie’s. In less than two decades, Mudie’s had become a hegemonic leviathan in the circulating library business.
Proof of Mudie’s control over the market came in the early 1860s when the Library Company Limited of Pall Mall threatened to undermine Mudie’s subscription fee by further undercutting it by half. Mudie’s rate was already astonishingly low—slashing the price further to half a guinea was near “suicidal”. On top of this, the company allowed shareholders of a certain amount to be “free” subscribers. Two years on, “A Deluded Shareholder” complained in the Times about Pall Mall’s failure to pay dividends, the worthlessness of shares, and the shortage of books in the company. The firm went under within the year. Mudie’s was effective in that it basically froze out many of its rivals. Eventually, competing companies were either outdistanced or bought. With his cheap rate, assiduous advertising, and apparent gift for organization, Mudie had brought "the ruin of many lending libraries in London and the country, and the surrender to the public at large of almost all that made the library business worth doing." Although some libraries like W.H. Smiths continued to compete and eventually outlasted Mudie’s, during the 19th century the select library was by far and away the best.
As the years went by, novels soon became reworkings of the material and Mudie’s ‘catacombs’ storage began to fill to the brim. By 1894, it became clear that the three-decker had become obsolete and unprofitable, and Mudie banned his hallowed creation that had brought him such great success and control. In addition, Mudie could do little about the advent of public libraries which, over time, weakened his business. After the watershed of 1894, some libraries began to fill the hole between the new public libraries and the old circulating ones. Boot’s Booklovers’, for example, provided those of the previous upper middle class with a chance to retain their once held grip over libraries. Boots offered the middle class the opportunity to continue perusing a library that necessitated a certain subscription fee, ensuring that they did not rub shoulder with the common man, or perhaps bump into their own maid like they might at a public one.
Conclusion
In light of its eventual demise, Mudie’s Select Library still shaped and moulded the library world of the 19th century. It controlled and catered to the individual, ensured publishers followed its rules and predilections whilst providing them with an opportunity to make a name for themselves, and economically strong-manned other circulating libraries to assimilate to their model, forcing them out of business if they didn’t. Overall, Mudie’s reveals that the 19th century library and book world centred around economic power through capital, which manifested itself in an insistence on Victorian values and morals. This affected everyone—from the individual up to the system. Mudie’s influence was gravitational—a force to be reckoned with. Credence, moreover, has also given to recent revisionist history: discussions of children and women’s readership and the rise of fiction are addressed. Although Mudie’s, and traditional circulation libraries in general, came to an end with the slow but persistent rise of public libraries, they did much to set the stage for the future. Mudie’s firm attention to censorship and careful selection of moral and upright novels may well have paved the way for the debate on the hierarchy of novels in public libraries that defined the 20th century library world.
