Redefining the Republic of Letters: The Literary Public and Mudie’s Circulating Library

Abstract

In late 1860, Charles Mudie’s plans to expand his circulating library inspired his detractors and competitors to challenge the validity of his ‘right to selection’ – the process by which he chose which texts he would loan from his library. Over the next few months, prominent periodicals featured correspondence and editorials that decried or supported Mudie’s ostensible monopoly over literary exchange. While the initial argument was economic, the dispute extended beyond economics to religion, literary quality and culture. To connect these disparate fields, writers turned to the politics of interpretation: that is, whether specialists should define literary culture, or if a public comprised of individual, ‘common’ readers should determine their own standards for books. Mudie’s opponents advocated for individual readers’ right to read what they liked, how they liked. His supporters argued that the public needed specialists to guide their literary tastes. The resulting exchange about what I call the ‘literary public’ amplified conversations integral to the burgeoning field of literary studies as it was emerging in the London colleges through the 1850s and 1860s. The contributing authors, publishers and critics justified or refuted ideas foundational to the establishment of English literature as an academic study for the common reader. As part of the mid-century confrontation between popular literary consumption and academic culture, the Mudie debate helped to politicize the reception and circulation of English literature.

Keywords:

• Charles Mudie
• circulating library
• literary culture
• common reader
• monopoly
• history of the book

Notes

1. Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 18, 35.

2. Lewis Roberts, ‘Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34.1 (2006), pp. 1–25 (pp. 10–12).

3. Stephen Colclough also connects the 1860 conflict with a similar struggle in 1858 over Charles Reade’s collection Cream (Stephen Colclough, ‘New Innovations in Audience Control: The Select Library and Sensation’, in Reading and the Victorians, ed. by Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 31–46). See also Sarah Keith, ‘Literary Censorship and Mudie’s Library’, Colorado Quarterly, 21 (1973), pp. 359–72 (pp. 364–65).

4. The works on the formation of the identity of common readers and the reading public most influential to this essay are Richard Daniel Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900, ed. by Adele Buckland and Beth Palmer (New York: Ashgate, 2011); and Jonathan Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53.1 (1992), 47–70 and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

5. This essay is obviously philosophically indebted to the work of Jürgen Habermas, who describes the ‘literary public sphere’ as an initially private space wherein the family, the coffeehouse, the salon would rationally debate ideas and letters (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 51). The literary public sphere, Habermas argues, became a testing ground and incubator for the political public sphere, which exists separately from the state, but is dedicated to rational debate about the state. On the one hand, the conversation about Mudie’s library is part of Habermas’s literary public sphere in that it consists of public argument about the world of letters; on the other hand, it is a strange inversion of Habermas’s history, for the Victorian essayists couched their arguments about literature in the language of politics.

6. Underselling, in this case, the price of a subscription to his circulating stock. Mudie introduced the one-guinea per annum subscription to a market with prices up to ten times his amount. This effectively made him the default subscription for those on the lower socioeconomic end of the demographic interested in such services.

7. Altick, The English Common Reader, p. 263.

8. This means that inflation and wages remained more or less constant between 1826 when the price was set, and 1842 when Mudie opened his library. While one would expect that a constant price would make a commodity more accessible, Feinstein’s work on wages suggests that most people would have had very nearly the same flat amount of free income throughout the first half of the century. See Charles H. Feinstein, ‘Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution’, The Journal of Economic History, 58.3 (1998), 625–58 (esp. p. 653).

9. A. L. Bowley, Wages and Income in the United Kingdom since 1860 (New York: Macmillan & Company, 1937), p. 46.

10. ‘Advertisement’, Athenaeum, 6 October 1860, p. 437.

11. ‘Advertisement’, Athenaeum, 15 September 1855, p. 1042.; ‘Advertisement’, The Athenaeum, 23 May 1857, p. 680. See Guinevere Griest’s Mudie’s Circulating Library for the foundational work on Mudie’s library. For a contextualization of Mudie in Victorian publication practices, see Simon Eliot, ‘The Business of Victorian Publishing’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Deirdre David (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 37–60; also Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (New York: Verso, 1987). For more on Mudie’s economic practice, see, David Finkelstein, ‘“The Secret”: British Publishers and Mudie’s Struggle for Survival, 1861–65’, Publishing History, 34 (1993), 21–50.

12. Roberts, ‘Trafficking in Literary Authority’, p. 11.

13. ‘Advertisement’, The Athenaeum, 17 August 1850, p. 859.

14. ‘Advertisement’, Literary Gazette, 1987 (1855), 97–98 (p. 97).

15. J. M. W, ‘A Few Words About Novels.’, Sharpe’s London Magazine, 8 (1848), 213–14 (p. 13).

16. J. A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 5.

17. Catalogue of New and Standard Works in Circulation at Mudie’s Select Library (London: Mudie’s Select Library, 1860).

18. For more thorough histories of English in the Victorian era, see the foundational Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); the Marxist cultural analysis of Brian Doyle, English & Englishness (New York: Routledge, 1989); John Sutherland, ‘Journalism, Scholarship, and the University College London English Department’, in Grub Street and the Ivory Tower, ed. by Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 58–71; Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); and H. S. Jones, Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). While not specifically Victorian, Ian Reid, Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004) is also a valuable resource for this subject.

19. Alexander John Scott, On the Academical Study of a Vernacular Literature (London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1849), p. 24. For more on Scott’s importance in the early formation of the discipline, see David John Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of the English Language and Literature from its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 57.

20. David Masson, ‘Literature and the Labour Question’, North British Review, 14.28 (1851), 382–420 (p. 385, 386).

21. ‘Mudie’s Library’, Saturday Review, 3 November 1860, p. 550.

22. The editorial in the Saturday Review presents an interesting case for a public somewhere between the ivory tower and Wilkie Collins’ ‘Unknown Public’ (Household Words, 18.439 [1858], 217–22), Collins writes of those educated readers whose tastes incline toward the unbound quarto and the penny broadside, a vast readership of some ‘three million’ whose preferences do not at all intersect with the tastes of the literary elite. The public here, which depends on Mudie, possesses education and taste greater than the three million, but more or less independent of the academy.

23. ‘Mr. Mudie’s Monopoly’, Literary Gazette, 29 September 1860, pp. 252–53 (p. 253).

24. It is worth noting here that many of the writers offer a narrow lens with which to read Mudie as a man, businessman, and figurehead of his circulating library. This lens sees Mudie as partisan, as an underhanded businessman, and as religiously, morally, and politically conservative. The historical truth, as always, is likely much more complicated. In a recent book chapter, for example, Stephen Colclough suggests that we might read Mudie’s receptivity to texts such as Darwin’s Origin of Species and sensation fiction as an argument for a relative lack of censorship. In fact, as Colclough points out, one of the key objections about Mudie’s alleged partisanship is that he was a Dissenter, an identity which, Colclough reminds us, includes dissent (Colclough, pp. 34–35).

25. All citations in the above paragraph are from ‘Mr. Mudie’s Monopoly’, p. 253.

26. All citations in the above paragraph are from ‘Mr. Mudie’s Monopoly’, p. 253.

27. Charles Mudie, ‘Mr. Mudie’s Library’, Athenaeum, 6 October 1860, p. 451.

28. Z, ‘Mr. Mudie’s Monopoly’, Literary Gazette, 6 October 1860, p. 285.

29. The most contact a twenty-first century Victorianist is likely to have with Miriam May is as a passing mention in the Quarterly Review’s ‘Sensation Novels’ (ascribed to H. L. Mansel), where the novel appears in a list of ‘specimens of the theological novel, which emplo[y] the nerves as a vehicle for preaching in the literary sense of the term’ (Henry Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113 (1863), 481–514 (p. 504)).

30. My use of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ here is intentional; the concept is usefully applied to the formation of a reading public as well as a national public (see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (Verso, 2006)).

31. A Churchman, ‘Miriam May and Mr. Mudie’, Guardian, 10 October 1860, p. 884.

32. Arthur Robins, Miriam May: A Romance of Real Life (Saunders, Otley, and Co.) pp. 89, 90, 121, 370.

33. The novel concedes that Slie ‘dissents’ unofficially from some of the 39 Articles, but has subscribed to them to gain ordination in the Church. The vagueness of Slie’s theology, according to the narrator, is a product of Evangelical theology’s definition by negation, for ‘[i]t is hard to say what an “Evangelical” may be; the better may it be told what he is not’ (Robins, p. 284). And Slie, therefore, is ‘an ‘Evangelical without any abatement’, for ‘[h]e professed opinions in which he did not believe’, but ‘could not very well profess what he did believe in’ (pp. 288–289).

34. A Churchman, p. 884.

35. For all the sensation of A Churchman’s disclosure, Mudie himself did little to hide his religious views. Only two days after A Churchman’s article, the British Standard published an article on the deliberations over Cheshunt College entitled ‘The Negatives Triumphant’, which quoted Mudie from a 29 June 1860 meeting in language surprisingly resonant with the description of Evangelical thought in Miriam May: ‘He once called himself a “Dissenter.” […] He once glorified himself he was a “Nonconformist”’ but that now ‘[h]e had learnt better than to call himself by any name which in any way implied a negative’ (‘The Negatives Triumphant’, British Standard, 12 October 1860, 324–25 (p. 324)). The British Standard, meanwhile, insists that Mudie ‘repudiates the idea of belonging to any religious body. He exults that he is neither a Dissenter nor a Nonconformist’ (‘Mudie and the British Standard’, British Standard, 19 October 1860, 332.).

36. A Churchman, p. 884.

37. ‘Table-Talk’, Guardian, 10 October 1860, p. 888.

38. A Churchman.

39. Philo-Mudaeus, ‘To the Editor of the “Literary Gazette”’, Literary Gazette, 27 October 1860, p. 355.

40. Charles Mudie, ‘Mr. Mudie’, Guardian, 31 October 1860, p. 947.

41. Robins claims that Mudie told him, ‘I will take fifty copies to oblige the publishers, but I know I shall have to withdraw it’ (Arthur Robins, Untitled Correspondence in Literary Gazette, 27 October 1860, p. 355).

42. ‘Mr. Mudie’s Advertisement’, Literary Gazette, 10 November 1860, p. 398.

43. ‘Mr. Mudie’s Advertisement’, Literary Gazette, 10 November 1860, p. 398.

44. ‘Mr. Mudie’s Monopoly’, p. 253.

45. An Author of Some Standing, ‘Mr. Mudie’s Monopoly: To the Editor of the Literary Gazette’, Literary Gazette, 6 October 1860, p. 398.

46. Z also called for a combination, although Z’s argument is in this case purely economic: ‘What could be simpler than for them to form a combination among themselves? Workmen enjoy the privilege of ‘striking.’ I see no reason why publishers should not “strike” too’. Z also proposes the idea that the public can shape free trade with their purchasing decisions, and argues that ‘[t]he withdrawal of the annual pound will cause a speedy collapse in the Mudie fabric’.

47. A Second-Rate Author, ‘Mr. Mudie’s “Right of Selection”’, Literary Gazette, 17 November 1860, p. 426.

48. I derive these calculations from figures taken from Jonathan Rose, ‘Education, Literacy, and the Reader’, in A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 31–47; Census of England and Wales for the Year 1861, Volume 1: Numbers and Distribution of the People (London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1862), p. 74; and Robert Woods, The Demography of Victorian England and Wales (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 6. Again, Collins’s ‘Unknown Public’ is relevant here, for he recognizes the much larger readership who would have no contact with Mudie’s library.

49. Saunders, Otley, & Co., ‘Mudie’s “Select” Library’, Literary Gazette, 17 November 1860, p. 426.

50. Robins, Untitled Correspondence, p. 355.

51. Philo-Mudaeus, 355.

52. ‘Mudie’s Library’, Saturday Review, p. 550.

53. A Second Rate author says that the success of selection has ‘enabled [Mudie] to become the real autocrat of the literary world’; Fair Play, another Literary Gazette author, calls Mudie ‘a self-established autocrat between [publishers] and their customers’ (Fair Play, ‘To the Editor of the “Literary Gazette”’, Literary Gazette, 27 October 1860, p. 355); just below Philo-Mudaeus’s first article, alias Senex says that ‘the great autocrat does not even deign a reason for tabooing’ books he rejects (Senex, ‘To the Editor of the “Literary Gazette”’, Literary Gazette, 27 October 1860, p. 355); These and other articles purport that Mudie thinks himself intellectually and morally superior to the public, and that he ‘is in a position to make himself the dictator of literature’ (‘Mudie’s Library’, Saturday Review).

54. ‘Mr. Mudie’s Advertisement’, p. 398.

55. Z, p. 285.

56. An Old Bookseller, ‘To the Editor of the “Literary Gazette”’, Literary Gazette, 20 October 1860, p. 332.

57. ‘The Opening of Mr. Mudie’s New Hall’, Illustrated London News, 29 December 1860, p. 618. Though it should also be noted that, as David Finkelstein elaborates, Mudie then fell into financial difficulty for the three years immediately following the opening of his new building (see Finkelstein).

58. Mark Pattison, ‘Books and Critics’, Fortnightly Review, 22.131 (1877), 659–79 (p. 650).

59. Mark Pattison, ‘Books and Critics’, Fortnightly Review, 22.131 (1877), p. 662.

60. Mark Pattison, ‘Books and Critics’, Fortnightly Review, 22.131 (1877), p. 667.

61. Mark Pattison, ‘Books and Critics’, Fortnightly Review, 22.131 (1877), p. 663. Pattison argues that in 1876, the total number of new books was 2.920 (p. 667).

62. Fortnightly Review, p. 667, emphasis added.

63. Fortnightly Review, 673.