The Select Circulating Library

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.

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.

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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.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.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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.