Charles Edward Mudie
Charles Edward Mudie (18 October 1818 – 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 in the family newspaper shop until he was twenty-two. In 1840, Mudie opened his first shop on Upper King Street, Bloomsbury. Mudie's Lending Library Mudie originally opened his circulating library to give the public greater access to non-fiction works — which comprised nearly one third of his stock — but the market value of the novel brought him financial success. In 1842, he began to lend books, charging subscribers one guinea per year for the right to borrow one exchangeable volume of a novel at a time. (At that time, other book-lenders charged between four and ten guineas.) Mudie's model proved so successful that in 1852 he moved his "Select Library" to larger premises at 509, 510 & 511 New Oxford Street, at its junction with Museum Street and Hart Street, just a few yards south of the British Museum. The Vienna Café, a haunt of artists and writers using the British Museum Reading Room, stood opposite the library on New Oxford Street. Mudie's soon had outlets on Cross Street in Manchester and on New Street in Birmingham.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. 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 he obtained corresponding discounts. The company's withdrawn books were offered for sale at £5 for a hundred volumes in 1860. In the Victorian era, the cost of novels exceeded the means of most middle-class Englishmen, so 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. His "select" books were carefully chosen with these his standards 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", such as George Moore's A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummer's Wife (1885) and A Drama in Muslin (1886), also had