This small but perfectly formed paperback delves into the nineteenth-century role of Mudie’s Select Library in shaping British Victorian literary culture. From its founding in 1842 to its demise in 1937, Mudie’s was part of the fabric of British book culture, a key source for borrowing the latest fiction and literary works at reasonable monthly rates. Mudie’s history and significance were first explored in Guinevere Griest’s landmark study Mudie’s Select Library and the Victorian Novel (1970). Given the paucity of archival records covering Mudie’s business dealings, her work focused on placing his activities within wider cultural and literary contexts, drawing on external sources and contemporary reviews and commentary. Since then, Griest’s interpretation of his role as literary mediator has been refined and revisited by several studies drawing on data and archival information gleaned from other publishing and bookselling records, catalogues, and sales sources. Karen Wade builds on such approaches with a finely argued contribution that crunches data from Mudie’s catalogues and lists to provide interesting conclusions about Victorian reading habits. Particularly apt are her discussions on the role of marketing, promotion, and readership demands in shaping what appeared on Mudie’s shelves, and what survived annual culls to make space for new literary entrants. 

Charles Edward Mudie launched a small book lending store from his London stationery shop in Holborn in 1842. The idea of a circulating library, lending up-to-date journals and recently published books for a monthly fee, was not a new concept; the beginning of the circulating library can be traced back to the 1740s. But Mudie’s intervention, Mudie’s Select Library, proved remarkably successful, given it allowed readers a chance to borrow books that were too expensive to purchase on a general salary. Subscribers to the service rose exponentially, leading Mudie to shift to larger quarters at the corner of New Oxford Street in 1851. Yet by 1861, Mudie’s almost went bankrupt due to overexpansion in purchasing and costs in renovating their London flagship base. It was rescued by a secret cabal of publishers, who lent the firm enough credit to survive the crisis. 

Mudie’s Select Library recovered to become a key supplier and distributor of books and periodicals to the British and colonial markets. At its peak it had almost 50,000 subscribers across the British and colonial world. Books sent out in Mudie’s distinctive wooden chests would circulate by rail and through global supply networks to individual customers and libraries across the UK and to Canada, India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as to shipboard libraries steaming across colonial routes. By the 1890s, it was shipping around 1,000 boxes of books per week to meet demand. A “Mudie” box became a key item in suburban households, immortalised in the contemporary doggerel verse: “As children must have Punch and Judy/So I can’t do without my Mudie.” 

Mudie’s stock covered a wide range of genres and titles: history, biography, travel, religion, science; periodicals; and most significantly, fiction, which represented about 30-40% of titles listed in the firm’s catalogues over several decades. Mudie’s purchasing power based on subscription levels often meant his orders for books could ensure a work’s financial success on publication. The firm was not averse to extracting heavy discounts as a result, lowering the amount of income publishers and authors might gain from sales to Mudie’s.

One charge levelled against Mudie’s was that due to the firm’s unprecedented sway over book sales and viability, its decision on whether to stock a new work or not could lead to financial success or penury for an author, as well as be used a tool for suppressing content deemed inappropriate for Mudie’s customers. Karen Wade’s survey of Mudie’s catalogues over a 60-year period complicates such views. The study draws on data covering complete fiction listings extracted from eight catalogues issued between 1848 and 1907. The resulting dataset includes 22,040 unique titles produced by just over 6,000 authors. As a dataset used to gauge readership and marketing interactions in the nineteenth-century book trade, it is a focused resource, which, as Wade acknowledges, is incomplete inasmuch as it does not include Mudie’s substantial nonfiction listings. Nevertheless, this data allows insight into the type of works that were, as Wade notes, “‘vendible’: works that were appealing to both potential and existing subscribers, and which put forth what the library deemed to be correct signals about what was appropriate reading for them” (p. 21). Wade’s work usefully outlines what published catalogues can tell us about titles that were promoted, confirming how commercial considerations around sales, readership uptake, and continuing demand were often more influential than aesthetic or moral standards in deciding whether or not to highlight a book. 

Such selections, or pre-selections, also had an impact on overseas readership. Many colonial libraries, such as those noted in Singapore, subscribed to Mudie’s book boxes. Wade makes a key point that these outlets were not given options in terms of book choice, but forced to make do with general titles sent from London that were pre-selected for a British middle-class family readership, not an overseas readership. Wade also looks closely at the impact of Mudie’s selections on author longevity, noting that being featured in Mudie’s lists was no guarantee of financial success. Authors who produced multiple volumes over several years often subsisted on selling their copyrights outright to publishers for small sums ranging from £25-£50, with consequent need to manage a production treadmill of continual work to keep funds flowing. In their later years, several long-standing authors with multiple titles available for borrowing in Mudie’s catalogue resorted to applications to the Royal Literary Fund for hardship grants to make ends meet. Wade reinforces through deft use of data from Mudie’s catalogues and cultural contextualisation a general conception of the time: though frequent appearances on Mudie’s lists may have suggested otherwise, authorship for most was not a profitable profession. Wade’s book history focus provides us with a valuable window into publishing practices and Mudie’s role in expanding Victorian middle-class readership. On the one hand, Mudie’s Lending Library provided access to books at a reasonable monthly subscription fee. On the other hand, its power to ensure or curtail the financial success of a new work sustained a publishing format (the three-volume novel) that benefited its lending concerns to the detriment of publishers and authors. As a result, Wade concludes, Mudie “played a direct role in a system that kept books expensive [to buy], publishing profits low, and manuscripts cheap” (p. 71).

David Finkelstein, University College London