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Bloomsbury Project

Bloomsbury Institutions

Cultural

Mudie’s Circulating Library

Also known as Mudie’s/Mudie’s Select Library

History

It began as a stationery shop in Upper King Street from which Charles Edward Mudie started lending books in 1842 (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

By 1844 he was lending all sorts of books at a rate of a guinea (£1 1s) per year; this rate was said to be the despair of his rivals, who generally charged as much as 4–10 guineas per year (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

“The small shop in Bloomsbury was soon frequented by students from the recently founded University of London who were drawn by the books offered by this young radical in politics and...liberal in religion” (Francis Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches, 1893)

Mudie exercised personal control over what was available through his library (which was, after all, originally known as Mudie’s Select Library); he tried to provide a better range of quality books than his rivals, and was responsible for the first English publication of many American authors (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

By the late 1850s “[a] listing in Mudie’s selection had become one of the best advertisements for any novel” (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

As well as quality, Mudie aimed at quantity; he purchased 8 tons of books from Longmans in 1855, and by the end of the nineteenth century, it was estimated that he had as many as 7½ million books (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

By 1852 the library had already outgrown its original premises, now part of Southampton Row, and accordingly moved to a new larger building on the corner of recently-constructed New Oxford Street and Museum Street (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

“Soon to be one of thee landmarks of the street, the stuccoed Regency building was, in the Athenaeum’s judgment, one of hte most successfully designed classic structures in London” (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

It had a circular hall like the British Museum Reading Room, and illustrations of its shelving and “catacombs” show the immense scale and organisation of the institution, comparable with a major academic library

As the business thrived, so it expanded, with branches opening in the City of London, Birmingham, and Manchester, and expansion overseas commencing in 1860 (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

The business became a limited liability company in 1864, with Mudie retaining 50% of its £100,000 capital, and a salary as manager of £1,000 per annum (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

Mudie’s eldest son Charles Henry Mudie, who had joined the firm in 1871, was intended to take over running the firm from his father, but died unexpectedly in 1879; Mudie never really recovered, handing over control instead to his younger son, Arthur, and others, in 1884 (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

It was struggling by the early nineteenth century, and soon afterward, with too much competition from other lending libraries, had to move to Kingsway (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

It suddenly ceased trading by court order on 12 July 1937 (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970); the shock at its passing was the subject of an editorial in The Times (The Times, 12 July 1937)

The move from its landmark premises in New Oxford Street to Kingsway around 1934 was widely seen as the beginning of the end (The Times, 12 July 1937)

The building itself stood empty for years, and was bombed to destruction in the Second World War (Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, 1970)

Harrods acquired much of its stock and sold it off at reduced prices (The Times, 1 September 1937)

Charles Mudie’s eldest daughter Mary Mudie outlived the family firm, dying in December 1937 at the age of 89 (The Times, 31 December 1937)

She had also outlived Mudie’s favourite son Charles, briefly his successor as head of the firm, by fifty-eight years (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

What was reforming about it?

Where in Bloomsbury

It was located at what was then 28 Upper King Street from 1840

In 1852 it moved into bigger premises at 30–34 (now 510, although the building itself has gone) New Oxford Street, and the premises were further enlarged in 1860 with the addition of a central hall

Its move from its landmark premises in New Oxford Street to Kingsway around 1934 was widely seen as the beginning of the end (The Times, 12 July 1937)

Website of current institution

It no longer exists

Books about it

There is a concise but extremely informative entry on Mudie and his library in John Sutherland’s Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1990) (originally published as the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction in 1988)

James Milne, ‘Mudie’s: The Diamond Jubilee of a Great Library,’ Strand, vol. 63 (August 1919)

Sara Keith, ‘Mudie’s Circulating Library,’ Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 11 (September 1956)

Guinevere L. Griest, ‘A Victorian Leviathan: Mudie’s Select Library,’ Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 20 (September 1965)

Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (1970)

Archives

The personal papers of Charles Edward Mudie, founder of the library, are held in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ref. UIU00041; more details are available online via the University of Illinois’s Library website (opens in new window)

This collection includes information relating to library subscriptions

This page last modified 19 April, 2011 by Deborah Colville

 

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