Mudie S Circulating Library And The Victorian Novel

Catalogue of New and Standard Works in Circulation at Mudie's Select Library is a comprehensive list of books available for loan from Mudie's Select Library, one of the largest circulating libraries in 19th-century England. The catalogue includes works in a wide variety of genres and subjects, including fiction, history, biography, and science. This book is a fascinating snapshot of Victorian reading tastes and an essential resource for scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Utilizing recent developments in book history and digital humanities, this book offers a cultural, economic, and literary history of the Victorian three-volume novel, the prestige format for the British novel during much of the nineteenth century. With the publication of Walter Scott’s popular novels in the 1820s, the three-volume novel became the standard format for new fiction aimed at middle-class audiences through the support of circulating libraries. Following a quantitative analysis examining who wrote and published these novels, the book investigates the success of publisher Richard Bentley in producing three-volume novels, the experiences of the W. H. Smith circulating library in distributing them, the difficulties of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Moore in writing them, and the resistance of new publishers such as Arrowsmith and Unwin to publishing them. Rather than faltering, the three-volume novel stubbornly endured until its abandonment in the 1890s.

A History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland describes the development of libraries in Great Britain and Ireland over some 1500 years, and their role as a part of the social, intellectual and cultural history. In addition to obvious links with the history of books and literature, the volumes include consideration of education, technology, social philosophy, architecture and the arts, as they have affected libraries. The significant international dimension, which has affected British and Irish libraries from the Middle Ages to the present, receives due attention. Other themes considered in each volume include the housing, storage and maintenance of books and other material; the individuals responsible for their care and those who used them; developments in provision, organization and cataloguing; and the principles and attitudes - of librarians and users - which such developments reflect.

Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

Romantic Encounters focuses on literary periodicals of the 1830s to describe the destabilization of readerly and writerly identities which occurs when Romantic irony meets an apparently rising literary marketplace.

From 1842, when Charles Edward Mudie started lending books at his shop in Bloomsbury, until 1894 when the Library Establishment destroyed the three-decker, fiction maintained a recognized supremacy in the English world of letters. Between 1845 and 1870, when the potential earning power of the novel developed enormously, when literary critics saw the novel as the nineteenth century replacement for the epic and even the drama, when interest in fiction was sharpened by careful and copious criticism, when the novelist was demanding the right to be judged as a serious critic of life, Mudie's contributed essential elements by providing a central distributing agency and by the development of a cohesive body of readers. The circulating library had a significant influence on the Victorian literary milieu, and by championing the three-decker on the construction of novels themselves. For the student of the Victorian era, the institution that was Mudie's left a lasting imprint on authors, publishers, and the reading public, which this volume explores within the context of Victorian literary tastes and values.

The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, comprising of seven volumes, now in its fourth edition, compiles the contributions of major researchers and practitioners and explores the cultural institutions of more than 30 countries. This major reference presents over 550 entries extensively reviewed for accuracy in seven print volumes or online. The new fourth edition, which includes 55 new entires and 60 revised entries, continues to reflect the growing convergence among the disciplines that influence information and the cultural record, with coverage of the latest topics as well as classic articles of historical and theoretical importance.