I. The Three-Volume Novel and the Circulating Library: A Symbiotic Relationship

IN 1891, THOMAS GREENWOOD, a leading advocate for rate-supported libraries, issued a stern warning to public libraries on the inconvenience and unwarranted expense of three-volume novels: “it should be made an untransgressable rule never to purchase three-volume novels. They are expensive to buy and bind, [and] dear at almost any money for the space they occupy.” Greenwood explained that the risk in purchasing such books involved more than just their expense or bulk, for the three-volume novel was an unknown form, an object whose value had not yet been proven: “A novel which has any striking literary character or element of popularity will almost inevitably find its way into one volume form.” A book was thus constituted as valuable to a public library in terms of its cheapness and its convenience; the one-volume novel was “the form most suitable for circulation,” as well as for storage, and its publication in the one-volume format testified to and was the result of its literary and popular value to readers. “For this cheapening,” Greenwood asserted, “any Public Library can well afford to wait” (401).

However, Mudie's Select Library could not “afford to wait” for this cheaper, convenient transformation from three- to one-volume. Indeed, the three-volume novel was an object which was produced in order to supply the circulating libraries, and it was this particular format and genre which provided the basis of Mudie's success.¹

As Arthur Waugh has written, in his memoirs of Chapman & Hall, “the three-volume novel was…the unit of [circulating] library commerce. There was a wide margin of profit upon it” (107). The three-volume novel had a bookstore price of 31s.6d, a price clearly out of reach for most readers. At such a price, it would be unprofitable for publishers to produce three-volume novels, if such products were intended for sale to individual readers. Moreover, 31s.6d per copy would be much too expensive for even a large circulating library like Mudie's, which required a large number of copies to meet the needs of its subscriptions. In fact, Mudie's Library never paid this high price; its dealings with publishers always included a substantial discount, often fifty percent or higher. While publishers attempted to charge Mudie's as much as possible, they actually had little choice but to capitulate to his demands for discounts;² the lack of any other real outlet for three-volume novels, coupled with the almost guaranteed large quantities ordered by Mudie's, made the three-volume format inevitably wedded to the circulating library system. This guaranteed a profit for all concerned: publishers were able to publish more novels by more writers due to Mudie's demands for large numbers of copies and more and more new books, while Mudie's was able to obtain significant, and exclusive, discounts due to his large subscription base and volume ordering.³ “It was Mr. Mudie's custom to cut prices for a good order,” Waugh wrote; “it was not difficult to meet his views and yet secure a profit” (102).

The three-volume novel was a product well suited to the needs of circulating libraries, and consequently, Mudie's Select Library was structured to maximize the triple-decker's usefulness. Simply put, a novel in three volumes could be circulated to three times as many patrons. Mudie's famous subscription rate of “one guinea per annum” allowed subscribers to borrow one volume at a time and exchange it as often as they desired. This meant that a single subscriber could only obtain one volume at a time of any three-volume novel; the desire to complete the novel would either keep patrons coming back to the library, or else spur them to invest in a higher-priced subscription rate in order to get access to a complete triple-decker.⁴

Griest notes that Mudie's “discount on the three-decker…was proportionally greater than for one-volume” novels; Mudie was thus able to “tripl[e] the number of subscribers he could serve with one title” while paying proportionally less for each volume in the first place (40).

The establishment of a three-volume novel's economic value was more complex than the standardized guinea-and-a-half price would seem to indicate. Mudie's had no standardized discount, even though discounts were expected and indeed required. The standard price therefore cannot be regarded as an indication of the novel's commoditization. The 31s.6d. price was never the basis of exchange–indeed, the high price functioned solely as a deterrent to individual buyers. Instead, we need to examine how novels came to be “in” Mudie's Library in the first place, in order to see the three-volume novel entering into an arena of exchange. In the negotiations over the percentage of the discount and the number of copies to be ordered, the three-volume novel was first situated as a commodity.

The production of a novel (or any textual object) is a complex process, and its very complexity is often cloaked by ideals about the solitary, unitary author. As Michel Foucault has shown, the “author-function” of a text tells us more about how a culture views the act of writing, and attributes status to categories of written discourse, than it does about the multiple ways by which textual objects come into being.⁵

This discussion of exchange must begin with the construction of the three-volume novel as a commodity; however, I am intentionally excluding what many would regard as the “actual” beginning of a novel, that is, the act of an author putting pen to paper. Instead, I am constructing the beginning of a novel's production in that moment of negotiation between the publisher and the library over the purchase of the physical object.⁶

To call this point the “beginning” highlights the importance of exchange in a novel's potential “commodity-hood” (Appadurai 13). By the time that Mudie's Library was negotiating the purchase of a novel, a number of decisions and material operations had already taken place. The novel had been accepted by a publisher; it had been revised; its format, almost inevitably in three volumes, had been decided; the type had been set; and a minimal number of copies printed and bound.⁷

In any negotiation between Mudie's and a publishing house, the object of negotiation was not a literary text, nor was literary value a primary consideration. Rather, Mudie's decision to purchase a particular novel, and a particular number of copies, was based on numerous factors, such as how well that novel would be presumed to circulate, how much appeal it might have for Mudie's patrons. The library often purchased substantial quantities of new novels by “proven” authors: for example, Mudie's ordered 3,000 copies of Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and 3,100 of Silas Marner. Mudie's concern over the percentage of his discount could often determine if a novel would be purchased at all; he informed George Bentley in 1881 that “he would buy at 12s. a copy or not buy at all” (Gettmann 132). Mudie was also concerned with how a novel would fit with the respectable reputation of the library. Objecting to the “suggestive” title “New Godiva,” he insisted that Richard Bentley “take back 50” of the uncut copies (qtd. in Sutherland 26). Mudie's past relations with publishers and authors could also determine his orders for particular three-deckers. A novel's exchangeability was overdetermined by many factors only obliquely related to its “content” or aesthetic value.

Within this decision to purchase, the three-volume novel is first clearly perceived as a commodity, for its value now lies in its ability to be exchanged. Arjun Appadurai, in a critique of the marxist emphasis on commodities as products, suggests that commodities should instead be viewed as “situations.” Commodification is a process in which value is created through the act of exchange:

Three-volume novels can be seen as commodities not simply because of their mode of production, but rather during certain situations in which they are the objects of exchange. For the Victorian three-volume novel, the opportunities for such a situation were severely limited–in effect, the new novel could only enter commodity-hood if its exchangeability were realized by Mudie's Library. With limited exceptions, a novel which Mudie's chose to ignore would not be successful–the publisher would not be able to make up for such a loss by selling to any other customers or institutions. In addition, the various schemes which publishers tried from time to time to break Mudie's hold on the purchasing of new three-volume novels inevitably failed to produce sufficient profits, and had the side drawback of risking Mudie's disapproval and subsequent retaliation by reducing his orders. For example, in October 1853 George Bentley announced that his price for all new three-volume novels would be reduced to 10s.6d. Two months later, Bentley's prices were back up to the standard 31s.6d. (Griest 67–68). And Samuel Tinsley, in 1871, attempted to publish new novels in one-volume editions at 4s. each–he published only two titles (Griest 68–69). Guinevere Griest writes that all such attempts were unsuccessful “primarily because of the great influence of the circulating library”:

The triple-decker thus had only one real situation in which it could successfully attain an initial commodity status–it had to be purchased by Mudie's Library. Appadurai writes that the commodity situation of any “thing” has three stages: 1) its “commodity phase,” during which the object's exchangeability is its “relevant feature”; 2) its “commodity candidacy,” that is, the cultural or contextual “standards and criteria…that define [its] exchangeability”; and 3) its commodity context, “the variety of social arenas…that help link the commodity candidacy of a thing to the commodity phase of its career” (13–15). The commodity context for the Victorian three-volume novel was extremely limited, because Mudie's Library determined the “standards and criteria” under which a novel would be purchased. This might seem to imply that the commodity phase of the triple-decker was also extremely limited, given that its purchase was aimed so narrowly at Mudie's Library. After that initial exchange, the novel ostensibly ceased to be a commodity and instead became a possession of Mudie's Select Library.⁸

However, once the novel became a library book, its circulation, its exchangeability, continued to be an extremely relevant component of its value, and so its potential commodity-hood, its commodity candidacy, continued to be relevant.

The purpose of Mudie's was to act as a center of exchange in which books circulated between the library and its patrons. This “internal” circulation of texts is not a process of direct economic exchange–most importantly, ownership does not shift, and the economic implications of such an exchange situation are not explicitly evident. Indeed, the commodity status which novels obtained through the process of entering Mudie's was variously multiplied, fractured, denied, and reinvoked, depending on the way in which its exchangeability was defined by the particular practices of the library. We must attend to the various spaces and statuses which the three-volume novel could occupy within Mudie's Library in order to see how each change in the novel's position allowed for the mediation of its commodity-hood. As novels were exchanged, they themselves seemed to exchange one kind of value or status for another. The shifting relations among the novel itself, the particular institutional space within which it resided, and its interactions with readers, elided the contradictions of commoditization and literary value.

Mudie's Select Library helped to mediate the commodification of literature and literacy through a complex system (and discourse) of exchange: the literary text could be valued apart from, but along side of, the triple-decker objects which were the vehicle of its circulation. Indeed, an examination of the various positions which a novel occupied as it travelled through the library provides a good example of the conflicts between economic and literary value in Victorian society. Igor Kopytoff has noted how physical objects can be said to have “cultural biographies” which reflect the ways that commodities are not only “produced materially as things,” but are also “culturally marked as being a certain kind of thing” (64). In constructing such a biography, “one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people”:

I propose to examine the “biographical possibilities” of three-volume novels as they moved through Mudie's Select Library. These possibilities can be seen as various relations between the novels themselves and the library's patrons: when could the novel be borrowed? was it highly desired or recommended? when was it rebound? when was it on display or stored out of sight? when was it sold as a used copy? or sold for other purposes?

As the novel slipped in and out of a commodity status, we can see that Mudie's tried not merely to control the relations between readers and texts, but also to credential, legitimize, and even “launder,” the commodification of literature. Within Mudie's Library, commoditization of the novel was intensely localized in a particular format and price while simultaneously obfuscated through an emphasis on borrowing and selection; literary and economic value were variously realized and hidden as the novel moved from one point in the library to another.

II. The “Great Hall”: Decorative Novels in the Space of Exchange

WHEN A NEWLY PURCHASED NOVEL entered the library, it most likely would end up in the “Great Hall, a large room, on the wall of which 16,000 of the current works most in vogue are shelved” (Curwen 427). The “Great Hall” was the center of borrowing in the library; not only were the newest and most requested books shelved here on display, but the Hall was the point of exchange for patrons wishing to return or obtain their next volumes. The very surroundings signaled the importance, and desirability, of the books housed therein, “This hall, a very handsome one indeed, which is lined with innumerable volumes, in various bindings, has a roof through which the light descends from a ground-glass lantern in the ceiling, is supported by fine Ionic columns, and light iron galleries” (Friswell 522).

The books themselves formed part of the Hall's decoration:

In this space of honor and desire, the novels on display are for the most part curiously faceless, depicted only as decorative hues, as part of the grandeur of the library, rather than the objects of exchange and desire which they were ostensibly placed there to be. The color blue thus “represents” the “supply” of “some” novel. This distancing is not merely a matter of attention to the aesthetics of architectural space, but rather a function of a larger distancing process which the library enacted specifically on novels (note, for example, that the only text here given a name is a work of non-fiction). The status conferred on the novels in this “space of exchange”⁹ is at once high and anonymous, for these new novels, currently “in vogue,” would shortly disappear from the Great Hall to be replaced by other, newer books, probably bound in the same colors and equally impressive in their sheer wall-covering quantity. Thus, at the height of its desirability, its exchangeability, to the library's patrons, the novel's value seems inert and non-specific, and this creates a distance, indeed a fracture, between the novel's economic value and its literary value, a distance which the library will try to maintain throughout all of the spaces and statuses the novel will occupy. Here in the Hall the novels were turned into decorative objects, part of the background of the aesthetic space of the Great Hall, and only in this anonymity, this mass quantity, could they represent the economic concepts of “supply” and “demand.” As anonymous quantities of things, they could still possess some features of their commodity phase. As each volume circulates to individual patrons, however, this anonymity will be erased, and thus, as we will see, the economic value of each novel will be obfuscated as its literary value is brought to the fore. The aesthetic effects of these novels are neither literary nor artistic, but rather “decorative”; they enhance the look of the space itself, but the novels by themselves hold no individual, particular aesthetic status.

The spatial relations of this Great Hall had panoptical, disciplining qualities, not the least of which was the display of the books themselves. As described by William Preston in an 1894 article in Good Words, the Hall contained a “series of desks or counters [which] form[ed] a circle around this apartment.” Half of this circle was “devoted to the exchange of books,” and was “divided into sections each distinguished by letters of the alphabet.…The subscribers whose names fall within the range indicated by these letters hand in their books at that particular section, and receive in turn the volumes asked for” (670). The other half-circle of desks belonged to the “managers and clerks, with their glass screens…affording a view of all that is going on” (671). The Great Hall was designed as a space in which both books and patrons could be seen, but any interactions between books and readers were either regulated by the system, the “great order and method that everywhere obtains” (Curwin 427), or limited to the appreciation of their decorative qualities (or perhaps their decorative quantities). Patrons returned their volumes to the appropriate desk, and requested new volumes at the same place, which the attendants then retrieved from the shelves all around them. “This system is so excellent and the attendants are so numerous and alert,” wrote Preston, “that the whole business of exchange is managed with remarkable silence and celerity” (670–71).¹⁰

Thus the distance between the patrons and the masses of books on display was maintained; the novel's commodity-phase (that is, its initial purchase) was thereby mediated, as the novels were transformed into wall decorations, distanced in their sheer number and in the over-awing magnitude of their surroundings, from the readers who came to borrow them. Those readers, too, were on display, their movements regulated alphabetically, and their desires recorded on cards, which were also kept alphabetically filed.

This distancing effectively set up the novel for a new phase of exchange; if a commodity situation is one in which exchangeability is an object's most relevant feature, then the exchange of novels within the library echoes such a situation. Indeed, the novel's commodity candidacy is in some sense always active as long as it is in circulation, whether or not it is involved in a quid pro quo economic exchange or shift in ownership. This commoditization of the novel was further echoed in the very set up of the library–a patron returned and received a volume at the same desk, and this situation took on the appearance of a commodity transaction in its emphasis on exchange. When a patron returned a library book and exchanged it for another, was the book's commodity status reinvoked? At first glance, no. What we see here are two simultaneous, but differentiated transactions: a return (the obligatory completion of the act of borrowing), and a new act of borrowing (eventually ending in a return). Clearly, the first book could be returned without another book being withdrawn, and so a direct exchange or barter of one for another has not taken place. However, if we look at these transactions as not simply circulating goods (novels), but also as involving the exchange of services, we can see that the novel does achieve a faint economic echo, as it must in order for the transaction of services to be valid, for the economic exchange is disconnected both temporally and spatially from the actual act of borrowing. For the price of one guinea per annum, the patron is purchasing the right to receive one volume at a time, and so the price of subscription is reinvoked each time another volume is retrieved from the library. It is this service which is commodified, however, not the novel itself–through this service, the commodity phase of the novel is thus mitigated. The novel's potential commodity-hood is mirrored in this very process of exchange, but the act of borrowing, as opposed to buying, insulates the novel itself from any direct appearance as an economic object.

The library's policy of the exchangeability of any text for any other text serves to underscore, and indeed naturalize, the commodification of books– books are things which are constantly in circulation, always being exchanged, always potentially exchangeable. However, the practices of Mudie's Library distanced the commodity potential of the novel in some way, just as the novels themselves were displayed as decorative objects and distanced from the patrons in the Great Hall. The most obvious, and powerful, way of achieving this distance was through the library's policy and politics of selection. Mudie's constant impulse to uphold a textual hierarchy by excluding those texts, especially novels, which were not deemed “good enough” for the library's patrons, had the effect of credentializing literary categories. Mudie's Select Library bracketed the literary as a unique, uncommodifiable category; its policy of borrowing enacted this divorce of the literary from the economic by enabling its readers to obtain works of literature without having to buy them. The literary text could be used by the reader without any direct appeal to its economic value. Meanwhile, the library reinforced, through the actual circulation of texts, that very commodification that could lead to the homogenization of value, that it sought to obscure–the patron had the right to exchange any one volume for any other, Mudie's advertisements proclaimed, and the reader could be certain that any work circulated by Mudie's would be “select.”

III. Selection: Legitimizing Literary Value

WHILE THIS INSTITUTIONALIZED BORROWING emphasized the exchangeability of novels, it in no way implied that all novels, independent of the institution, were equally valuable–indeed, the value of a “Mudie novel” was disconnected from such a homogenizing effect of commoditization through an assurance that all novels exchanged through Mudie's Library had already been judged as worthy of circulation.¹¹

Mudie's patrons could be certain that the novels they borrowed had been distinguished from less valuable texts, and this act of distinction was grounded in the moment of the novel's purchase. In choosing to buy a particular novel, Mudie's was seen as acknowledging its literary value. Meanwhile, the very fact of such discriminating selection on the part of Mudie's as a buyer helped to disguise that act of commoditization as a kind of stewardship, an act of convenience and protection on behalf of his subscribers, and an act of critical, curatorial judgment in regard to the books themselves. It seemed as though Mudie's had not so much bought the novels as granted them the privilege of belonging to the library. This is the “librarian function”: value was ascribed to the individual books not through the name of the author or the content of the text, but through the material association of the individual copy with Mudie's Library.

In choosing to distinguish his library by the title “Select,” Mudie has been seen as breaking with earlier attitudes toward circulating libraries, which regarded such institutions as corrupt or frivolous, catering to vulgar reading tastes by providing access to the lowest orders of fiction.¹²

Termed “evergreen trees of diabolical knowledge” by Sir Anthony Absolute in Richard Sheridan's 1775 The Rivals,¹³ eighteenth-century circulating libraries were sometimes regarded as degrading literature by catering to uncritical, uneducated (mostly female) readers who desired the sentiment and romance of gothic novels, an attitude which has colored much of the scholarship on the history of novel reading, as is evident in Ian Watt's condemnation of the “pressures towards literary degradation” exerted by circulating libraries (290).¹⁴ In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared that such readers, “the devotees of the circulating libraries,” did not so much engage in reading as in “a sort of beggarly day-dreaming” (28n2).¹⁵ By 1842, when Charles Mudie began lending out books from his stationer's shop, circulating libraries seemed both expensive and vulgar, providing access to novels without taste or morality. In an 1880 Athenaeum advertisement, this earlier attitude was still used to underscore the uniquely select nature of Mudie's Library: “MUDIE'S SELECT LIBRARY was established in 1842 in order to meet the growing demand of the age for a Higher Class of Books than could then be readily obtained on moderate terms from the ordinary Circulating Libraries” (29 May 1880: 685). This insistence on the “Higher Class of Books” in his establishment enabled Mudie to position his circulating library as an extraordinarily respectable, affordable, and ultimately indispensable, institution of literary authority.

This emphasis on selection can be seen throughout Mudie's advertisements in the Athenaeum, and indeed these advertising “lists” were part of the discursive space of the library itself. In addition to placing the newest and most requested novels on display in the Great Hall, Mudie's also placed them in these advertisements, and in so doing, positioned the novels in an assumed textual hierarchy. Such hierarchies often function rhetorically as binaries, differentiating one object from another.¹⁶

In Mudie's advertisements, a similar hierarchical rhetoric was invoked in the use of terms such as “the best New works,” “Works of permanent interest and value,” “the HIGHER CLASS of FICTION,” and “works of Acknowledged merit.”

These advertising lists were used to place three-volume novels into a respectable relation with other genres. The booklists were often prefaced by the claim that “All the best New Works of HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, and TRAVEL are added to this Library on the day of Publication…. The best Works of FICTION are also freely added” (16 October 1852: 1106). Likewise, an advertisement might proclaim: “The widest possible circulation is given at this Library to every Recent Work of acknowledged merit or general interest in HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, TRAVEL, and the HIGHER CLASS of FICTION” (18 August 1860: 214). The novels which Mudie allowed into his library were thus of a class on par with respectable genres such as history and biography; furthermore, by placing fiction last in this series of genres, and by positioning novels often at the end of his lists, Mudie characterized his library as more than simply a disseminator of fiction. The list of titles served “to show the character of the entire Collection,” representing the library as an institution which valued, and circulated, only those novels which measured up to the standards, the character, and the respectability of the most serious genres.

The importance of these advertisements in establishing and maintaining the value of a novel can be seen in the anxiety which was occasioned when a title was not listed. When Scenes of Clerical Life did not appear in Mudie's lists, George Lewes wrote to John Blackwood that George Eliot “takes it as a sign that Mudie doesn't think much of the book.” Eliot herself later wrote to Blackwood, asking, “Can you imagine why Mudie has almost always left the C[lerical] S[cenes] out of his advertised list, although he puts in very trashy and obscure books? I hope it is nothing more than chance.” (qtd. in Griest 20). The exclusion of Eliot's novel caused such bewilderment precisely because of the hierarchical function of the lists: the implication for Eliot was that her novel was not even as valuable as the “trashy and obscure books” which were included in the advertisements. Although Eliot did not outwardly value the judgment of Mudie's lists, her anxiety over the omission indicates the power which these lists exerted in establishing the relative value and success of a novel. Eliot's appeal to “nothing more than chance” seems to be an uneasy attempt to avoid the other possible explanation: that her work was not deemed valuable by this powerful institution of literary authority.

IV. Selection vs. Censorship: Trafficking in Literary Authority

GUINEVERE GRIEST NOTES HOW Mudie's selection process encompassed both the availability and exclusion of texts. On the one hand, the library had to “energetically ensur[e] that new works…were immediately available,” while on the other, patrons were assured that Mudie's “carefully excluded certain books for ‘moral reasons’” (18). Mudie's Select Library provided the sense of an almost unlimited quantity of texts from which to choose, while also asserting that “certain books” had already been excluded from that quantity. Availability and exclusion were the two incommensurable services which the library struggled to reconcile by maintaining a distance between the economic and the literary, a distance which constantly threatened to undermine the library's authority.

Significantly, the basis of exclusion, in Mudie's own rhetoric, was “moral,” not literary. Griest quotes from a letter which Mudie wrote to the Athenaeum in 1860, defending his library against a charge of censorship which had just appeared in the Literary Gazette.¹⁷

In using Mudie's term “moral reasons,” Griest points toward a central argument which arose from the contradictions between economic and literary value (and between availability and exclusion): by obscuring the commodification of novels through an appeal to the select status of the library's books, Mudie's left itself open to charges of censorship and conflicts with authors over discursive authority. Mudie's adversaries often couched such conflicts in economic terms, portraying Mudie as a tradesman who was improperly acting as a critic of literature.

On 29 September 1860, the Literary Gazette published “Mr. Mudie's Monopoly,” in which Mudie was depicted as an “ambitious son of a very respectable stationer” who “would bargain for an eternity where the terms were ‘cash’” (252). While this article deplored the effects of Mudie's Library on the publishing world, particularly its role in maintaining the high price of novels, the attack focused on Charles Mudie's social position and consequent inability to judge literary works.

In effect, this article argued that the economic power gained from his monopoly on the reading public enabled Mudie to cross educational and class boundaries, and to confuse his economic position with genuine literary taste. In response to “Mr. Mudie's Monopoly,” a correspondent wrote: “Instead of following the public taste, as every tradesman is supposed to do, Mudie, by insidious means, contrives to lead it” (Z. 285). And in a follow up to its first article, the Literary Gazette charged, “[I]t is detrimental to the interests of the public…to have their tastes directed by a person who, by education and position, is singularly unfit for so august an office” (“Mr. Mudie's Advertisement” 398).

Much of the anti-Mudie rhetoric in the pages of the Literary Gazette and elsewhere echoed this sense of contrivance and treachery, this image of an over-reaching tradesman dictating matters of taste to his social superiors through a perverse and “insidious” abuse of his economic power. In Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (1885), one of the most well-known attacks on Mudie's Library, the novelist George Moore set out to demonstrate that Mudie's selection of novels was neither as consistent nor as “moral” as “the title Select Library would lead us to expect” (5). In the course of comparing passages from currently popular novels circulated by Mudie's with his own novel, A Modern Love, which Mudie's had refused to stock, Moore explained Mudie's inconsistency in selection by reference to his status as tradesman: “how absurd and how futile is the censorship which a mere tradesman assumes to exercise over the literature of the nineteenth century” (17). While “the strange paradox of a tradesman dictating to the bishops of England what is proper and improper for them to read” was dismissed as mere “insolence,” Moore saw the economic power of Mudie's Library as at odds with English literature itself: “[T]he character for strength, virility, and purpose, which our literature has always held, the old literary tradition coming down to us through a long line of glorious ancestors, is being gradually obliterated to suit the commercial views of a narrow-minded tradesman” (18). Such “commercial views” of the tradesman fall outside of the inherited tradition of English literature, and Mudie's attempts to dictate literary taste, to become a part of that literary tradition, are seen as intrusive and destructive. Although his quarrel with Mudie over the banning of A Modern Love was based on the consequent assumption that his novel was immodest and immoral, Moore's rhetoric focused on precisely the disjunction of literary value and economic conditions which Mudie's Library continually sought to obfuscate. By confusing literary and economic value, the commercial library treats books like products; writers become mere workers, unappreciated, anonymous, and powerless, while Mudie assumes the role of the crude, exploitative capitalist:

In his most elaborated objection to these kinds of imputations, his letter to the Athenaeum on 5 October 1860, Mudie claimed a two-pronged defense for his “principle” of selection, in which he attempted to reconcile commercial and literary categories through an appeal to “moral reasons”:

Mudie does not specifically defend his taste in literature, nor apologize for his social position as tradesman; rather, his rhetoric acknowledges two different kinds of selection, while implying that all selection ultimately depends on the inherent, and obvious, quality of books themselves. The economic (commercial) and the literary (or moral) are seemingly harmonized through Mudie's commonsensical argument: “of course” no one institution could “provide space” for every book written, and thus the very act of making some books available also necessitates the exclusion of others. This is a “purely commercial” reason, having to do with a finite storage space and a limited ability to invest in new books, and yet, Mudie's argument implies that such spatial and financial limitations are themselves necessitated by the flood of “bad and stupid novels” which “[n]o library” could possibly contain. This judgment of literary quality is quickly translated in Mudie's rhetoric into an economic consideration; “bad and stupid novels” soon become “unremunerative stock” through death, and so their “worthless[ness]” is both literary and economic. Such novels have no commodity potential, for they can only be interred en mass, straining the purse of their purchaser but providing no remuneration, and this inability to be commodified is an indication of, indeed a direct result of, their lack of literary value. Literary and economic valuations can be conjoined, but only so long as both the literary quality and the commodity potential of a text are nonexistent.

Once this equation between economic and literary worth has been established (in the negative), Mudie then moves to the “more important” and “obvious” consideration of “moral” quality. Clearly, the function of selecting books according to “moral reasons” is presented as both protective and convenient –Mudie here positions his library as a barrier between bad (immoral) books and “the public.” As such, his acts of selection transcend mere economic considerations: he keeps his subscribers from harm by standing between them and “lower” literature. Mudie's use of the term moral refutes the charge of censorship without claiming any ability or right to judge literary quality; furthermore, this shift to moral reasons allows Mudie to link economic and literary considerations while asserting that his “right of selection” is employed not out of a desire to profit, but rather out of a need, a mandate, to protect “the public.”

Mudie's letter implies that the protective function of selection is the reason why the “public…subscribe accordingly and increasingly.” This easy elision of the public and Mudie's subscribers obscured the fact that these subscribers actually made up only a small (and exclusive) part of the British reading public.¹⁸

In its role as barrier, Mudie's Library provided a service, a convenience for its subscribers. These readers did not need help in distinguishing “the lower floods of literature”; rather, they needed to be freed from the tiresome, dis-tasteful (and expensive) necessity of doing so on their own. Mudie's allowed them to distance themselves from inferior, immoral texts (and from those who wrote and read them). The increasing subscriptions represented an affirmation both of Mudie's “right of selection,” and of the public's “willing[ness]” to cede him that task, a willingness based on the apparent exclusivity of Mudie's Select Library.¹⁹

The Literary Gazette pointed out derisively that Mudie's defense of his “right of selection” amounted to little more than an advertisement, but of course, the attempt to reconcile availability and exclusion, while maintaining a distance between economic and literary valuation, was precisely Mudie's selling point. Charges of censorship or tastelessness certainly indicate the contradictions and weaknesses in Mudie's institutional authority, but the success of the Library serves as a powerful sign that Mudie's subscribers generally felt that they benefitted from such institutional authority. The distance which Mudie's maintained between literary and economic value was accordingly echoed in the class distinctions found in the rhetoric of his supporters and patrons.

For example, when the actress, author, and abolitionist Fanny Kemble praised Mudie's Library in 1877, she did so in terms of the desirability of selection and the institutional mediation of economic value, “Of all the devices of our complex and complete civilization, I think this huge circulating library system one of the most convenient and agreeable;… to have…volumes of excellent literature for one's exclusive use, seems to me a real privilege, and capital return for one's money” (2: 73).

The most striking aspect of this endorsement is the conjoining of privilege and capital through the exclusiveness fostered by “this huge circulating library.” The displacement of the term “exclusive” is telling: Kemble regarded the library almost as though its books were her own personal possessions, but where one might expect the term “personal” or “private,” Kemble writes “exclusive use.” Reading the library's books becomes an “exclusive” act, one which is marked as a “privilege” and praised as “capital.” Again, the slippage of the word “capital” suggests the effacement of the commodity status of the books, and of the economic relationship between the library and its patrons. Rather than viewing the book as a form of capital (as the material object through which the library generates profit), Kemble's use of the word connotes a privileged relation between the book and the library's patrons. This relationship is based on an exclusivity which mirrors private property (“one's exclusive use”) even as it erases the need for ownership (“capital return for one's money”). The library is a convenient device, through which Kemble's monetary investment, her subscription, is returned to her as “real privilege,” so real it in effect makes the books act like her own possessions, obscuring their commodity potential as exchangeable objects.

Mudie's practice and rhetoric of selection fostered such a sense of “exclusiveness” among its readers–both books and patrons “belonged” to Mudie's Select Library, and this sense of an “exclusive collectivity” both underscored and elided class distinctions within a larger rhetoric of the library as a “national institution.”²⁰

The “collectivity” expressed in triple-deckers such as William Thackeray's Henry Esmond, the “experience of belonging, as to a family, a faith, or a people,” N. N. Feltes notes, was “grounded…in the real experience of belonging to Mudie's” (27). Feltes views this “exclusive collectivity” as an ideological consequence of the text itself, the plots, politics, and textual representations “within” the actual selected novel, and argues that the literary qualities of the texts created and maintained an ideologically cohesive reading community. In effect, this presumes that reading is merely a way of activating what is already “in” a particular text, and that the exclusivity created during reading is a result of the content of the books, and a collective result of a multitude of individual acts of reading. This presupposes that the books were selected primarily because of their content.

However, this dissociates the selection process itself, the material and discursive practices of moving novels through the library and marking them as “Mudie novels,” from the literate (and social) practices that readers enacted with those books. Feltes's concept of exclusive collectivity thus views the quality and effects of texts as ideologically predetermined; yet, the sense of exclusiveness which Mudie's fostered was based more on his rhetoric of selection than on the actual novels selected. The material practices and conditions of the library indicated this exclusiveness; as Feltes himself notes, “the ‘prestige’ and ‘grandeur’ associated with the three-decker,” what in the Great Hall would be seen as its decorative qualities, actually (re)enforced the perception of exclusivity and privilege among Mudie's subscribers. The “one-guinea-per-annum” subscription rate apparently opened up Mudie's to a larger, more democratic reading audience, but this rate, in conjunction with Mudie's rhetoric of selection, his “moral reasons,” actually worked to mark out a particular segment of the British reading public as “privileged.” And this sense of privilege was not simply the result of the pedagogical influences of the novels' contents, but rather, as Fanny Kemble wrote, the “convenien[ce]” and “agreeable[ness]” of this system of “exclusive use.”

The material and discursive functions of the library, the routines of exchanging volumes, the distancing of literary from economic value, the obfuscation of commodification, the sense of exclusive use, all worked to create a privileged reading community. The “real privilege” here, the lex privus or separate law, applied equally to readers and texts. Each circulated within an arena of exchange in which the general features of commodity-hood were manifestly overridden by special, separate rules of exchangeability–any one volume could be exchanged for any other volume, at any time, with any degree of frequency, as long as both the text and the reader belonged to the Library. This belonging, this intra-communal circulation, always implied its opposite: a laissez faire economic arena in which all texts were always obviously commodities. In such a literary marketplace, the privileged nature of belonging, of a separate law for those who can belong, would be impossible, and the very distinctiveness of literature, as well as of those who read it, would be endangered.

V. “Wherever the English Tongue is Spoken”: Distributing the Nation in Tin-Lined Boxes

NOT SURPRISINGLY, the exclusivity and privilege of Mudie's Library did not allow for more than the occasional glimpse of this other realm of exchange. Indeed, even those who attacked Mudie did so in the belief that his library actually threatened the exclusive, privileged category of literature through the potentially homogenizing effects of commodification and the marketplace. And yet Mudie's was not simply seen as serving a small, exclusive class of readers, nor did the library present itself as merely a class-based institution. While the exclusivity, the real privilege, fostered by Mudie's contributed to the success of the library by distinguishing its subscribers from the mass of readers, Mudie always spoke of his patrons as “the public.” A larger rhetoric of nationalism subsumed Mudie's Select Library in a general cultural project of homogenization, in the process of what Mary Poovey has called “the making of a social body.”

Poovey argues that, in the mid-nineteenth century, the “groundwork was laid for what would eventually assume the appearance of a single, ‘mass’ culture” (2). This groundwork included “technologies of representation,” such as the census, which were “capable of materializing an aggregate known as the ‘population,’” as well as “material innovations like affordable transportation, cheap publications, and national museums.” Such technologies and institutions “simultaneously brought groups…into physical proximity with each other and represented them as belonging to the same, increasingly undifferentiated whole” (4). Mudie's Select Library can be understood as such a technology of representation: the library not only disseminated textual objects representing “British culture” (both materially and linguistically), but also normalized reading practices and attitudes through its standardized distribution practices. Mudie's was also a national institution which represented Great Britain in its scope, power, and efficiency.²¹

Homi K. Bhabha writes that “nationalist discourses” often attempt “to produce the idea of the nation as a continuous narrative of national progress” (“Introduction” 1). Mudie's Select Library often entered into British nationalist discourses both as a model of a large efficient British institution capable of spanning the globe, and as an example of “one enterprising and intelligent man” who single-handedly transformed British reading practices (“Mudie's Circulating Library” 705). The history of Mudie's became a narrative of growth which mirrored the progress of Great Britain: “In these days,” remarked Once a Week in 1861, “is it to be wondered at that the spirit of enterprise has penetrated even into the sleepy old circulating library, and transformed it at once into a very mill-race of literary life?” (“Mudie's Circulating Library” 705).

Such a transformation was indeed viewed with wonder, and as the story of Mudie's Library was retold throughout the century, its place in the narrative of national and imperial progress took on a near-mythic quality. The library was, as Preston remarked in 1894, a “big concern,” and “the romance of its history” was a story which “cannot easily be spoiled in the telling” (668). One of the major elements in this romantic history was the sheer quantity of books with which Mudie's dealt; even the size of his establishment, which in 1873 “occupi[ed] the sites of eight houses” (Curwen 426), could not contain the enormity of the library's holdings. “At present,” wrote Friswell in 1871, “this great library–for it is vast– owns no less than 1,000,000 volumes, and, of course, these cannot all be lodged at one time. Thousands are floating about the country, in the hands of subscribers, or passing to and fro in the boxes, built almost as strong as a railway-carriage, destined to contain them” (521).

This image of a never-ending, far-reaching circulation was an important component in the construction of Mudie's as a “national institution,” and in the larger process of what Benedict Anderson has called “the imagined community of a nation.” In particular, the circulation of Mudie's books to “the colonies and British possessions” was positioned as part of the imperial project of disseminating British-ness throughout the world, and the role of language in this project was neatly tied to the type of goods which Mudie's exported. Curwen aptly noted that “the name of Mudie–and the well-known yellow label, familiar in every English household–is carried wherever the English tongue is spoken” (430). This exportation of the name, the symbol, and the language particularly garnered Curwen's admiration; the three-volume objects at once represented an extension of the familiar British domestic space and constructed Mudie's Library as a part of that space. Transported with (and transporting) the English tongue, Mudie's penetrated into alien spaces and countries, colonizing, domesticating, and naming them as British possessions.

The books themselves were also seen as intricately involved in constructing a familiar British community, and then expanding that community rhetorically and pedagogically throughout the empire. As late as 1924, Mudie's was retrospectively seen as “a clearing-house for English thought, habits, and deeds” (Milne 163). James Milne's depiction of Charles Mudie invoked an image of the hero as librarian: “always he was going out into the world with his boxes of books” (168). Milne wrote, “His idea was to scatter books, the best books, the product of the nation's best brains, by the thousand, nay, by the hundred thousand, throughout London and the towns and villages of the United Kingdom” (171).

Just as the British government was sending soldiers and administrators, Mudie's was sending books to colonize and illuminate the dark corners of the world through British culture. These tin-lined boxes of books were one of the most famous elements in Mudie's romantic history; their association with “railway-carriages” by Friswell was apt, for just as the railway helped to consolidate and convey British communities and commodities, Mudie's boxes of books transported the textual representations of British culture. Stories of how Mudie's boxes had “been dug up out of the bottom of the sea after shipwreck and their contents found to be perfectly uninjured” (Preston 671–72) underscored the solidity and inevitability of Mudie's colonizing the world with his books. Every book from Mudie's Library was unmistakably marked, “resplendent in its bright yellow cover imprinted with the Pegasus symbol” (Griest 18). No matter where in the world a Mudie's subscriber would go, whether to India or Africa or China, these books were conspicuously available, in such a way as to affirm to any Briton who saw them a sense of a world-wide British community, a nation which was powerful and extensive enough to encompass the globe with its literature.²²

Through this world-wide distribution of library books, a “succession of plurals” was created which confirmed and reified the British citizen's sense of national identity by presenting a “sociological solidarity” (Anderson 35), a place where “the social space is clearly bounded by such repeated objects that represent a naturalistic, nationalistic horizon” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 154).

As Mudie's Library was drawn into the rhetoric of nationalism, the exclusivity of the library's selection process was obscured–in its place was a cohesive, solidified notion of national identity and (racial) superiority that depended on the assumption of a stable literary hierarchy. The British literary tradition acted as a marker of British superiority, thereby justifying an imperial agenda–the distribution of the books throughout the empire was positioned as a sign of British wealth and value, British artistic superiority, British business expertise, even British benevolence. Distribution became a pedagogical function of the library, not only in the material distribution of books, but also in the rhetorical positioning of Mudie's as a national institution and the consequent obfuscation of the class base upon which the library system rested.

If indeed the dissemination of Mudie's books did create a familiar succession of objects which served in the imagining of the British nation and empire, still this “pluralism of the national sign” could not simply imply a cohesive and thoroughly homogeneous community. As Bhabha suggests, such a plurality often implies a doubling, an ambivalence which, because the national narrative has no “‘statist’ centre,” underscores cultural difference in the act of signifying national cohesion (154). Bhabha writes:

While the institutional machinery of Mudie's performed with extreme efficiency, disseminating the library's books into the social space and national narrative of the British empire, in the “temporality of the pedagogical” we can see the fissures in Mudie's national representative-ness.²³ If “the representation of the nation [is] a temporal process” (142), then the objects of national representation cannot simply be static signs–they must also be subjects, with their own history, their own status, and their own valuations, all of which must shift as they move through the temporal process of signification.

This temporality of the objects of representation should remind us of Igor Kopytoff's notion of the “cultural biography of things”; as Mudie's books were distributed as signs of British nationality, they carried with them the ambivalences of their own histories, including their literary valuations, their associations with Mudie's (as both censor and hero), and not least of all, their commodity-potential.²⁴

In order for these objects to perform as national signs, their literary value had to be seen as the primary impetus for their distribution; in this view, the library was indeed a “device” of a “complex and complete [British] civilisation” (Kemble 2: 73) which circulated “the best books, the product of the nation's best brains” (Milne 171) to “wherever the English tongue [wa]s spoken” (Curwin 430). Such a status for Mudie's books was certainly not uncontested, but in order for Mudie's to function rhetorically as a national institution, any associations which might call the literary status of its books into question had to be suppressed. Through the representation of the books as objects designed to carry Mudie's name and trademark–and the English language itself– economic value was dissociated from the primary consideration of literary quality. The novel's very familiarity as a household object obscured its economic status as borrowed, (ex)changeable property, and thus normalized and nationalized the library's selection practices as simply a part of everyday life in Britain.

VI. Novels on the Way Out: Reselling, Recycling, and Composting Literature

THE NOVEL'S SOJOURN through Mudie's Library was itself a temporal process, and the emphasis which Mudie's placed on “new novels” meant that a novel's desirability and exchangeability would soon depreciate. J. A. Sutherland notes that “unlike pies, books do not disappear once they are consumed” (33): the huge quantities of novels purchased by Mudie's may have been cause for wonder and evidence of the library's status as a national institution, but the material consequences of such accumulation had to be constantly managed if the library was to avoid being overwhelmed in a flood of its own making. Eventually, the commodity potential of these novels had to be reinvoked, the novels returned to the outside world of commodity circulation. The ideal way of doing this was to rebind and sell them as “well-selected second-hand books.” “More than Half a Million of Volumes are now on Sale,” proclaimed Mudie's Athenaeum ads, “and must be disposed of as soon as possible in order to provide additional space for the rapid accumulation of newer Books” (7 Feb. 1880: 172). Once a novel had “had its run” at Mudie's Library, if it still retained any desirability or exchangeability as a novel, it would be rebound into a one-volume format and placed on display in “the show-rooms devoted to the sale of bound books” (Curwen 426). In this new form, the novel would once again attain an obvious commodity status. This change in format from three- to one-volume marked a transition in the novel's exchangeability. The three-volume novel explicitly belonged to the library: it circulated in an enclosed arena of exchange. Now, however, in a one-volume format, the novel was clearly a commodity, packaged to be sold at a reduced price.²⁵

Mudie's show-rooms were the first spaces a patron would pass through upon entering the library, and were aptly positioned as a medium between the Great Hall and the outside, secular world: “Passing through the folding doors we find ourselves in a kind of outer court of this temple of literature, which again is divided into several smaller courts…all lined and filled with books, for the most part attractively arrayed upon innumerable shelves, but many in costly bindings beneath the protection of glass cases upon extensive tables” (Preston 670).

On the margins of the temple, outside of the Great Hall, these novels no longer held the status of the newest, the most desired; rather, they were “used,” and as such their exchangeability as Mudie novels was extremely limited. Now, in order to be exchanged, literary value and commodity potential had to be realized simultaneously. Nevertheless, these books still retained a kind of honored status, as is signalled by their proximity to the Great Hall: the decorative qualities of these books were what most attracted prospective buyers and browsers. Like the anonymous books in the Hall, these used copies signal their transitory state between commodity-hood and aesthetic object through their decorative qualities: Preston noted that their attraction was based more “on the supreme art of the book-binder than the contents of the volumes” (671). These were “works adapted for presents and prizes” (Curwen 427), and their exhibition was a “tempt[ation] to linger” (Preston 671). The commodity status of these works was unmediated, but their attractiveness was still enhanced by the aura of desirability and authority emanating from just inside the Great Hall.²⁶

Not all triple-deckers could be sold, however, even in a one-volume format. Novels which were not in demand, which would never be in demand, also had to be re-commodified, and so in addition to disposing of novels as second-hand copies, Mudie's also sold them as recyclable material. This conversion of value was seen as the final stage of the novel's failure to hold on to any literary value at all. Such books were “sold for waste paper,” their “covers…removed and the letterpress torn up” (“Mudie's Library” 188). These novels were most likely headed for the trunk-maker, but some had a more distasteful fate: “But here is another heap, and all of popular books, torn, dirtied, and ‘read–to death.’ They have served their purpose. They will not carry butter; nor will they ‘to the trunk-makers.’ Their purpose is –for manure! A fit end: after having served as food for the mind, their dead leaves produce food for the body” (Friswell 522). Friswell's notion of this “fit end” was kinder than most; the ability of the novel's “dead leaves” to produce food has a direct correlation to the novel's “purpose,” to provide “food for the mind.” Such alimentary metaphors for reading were not uncommon; however, they were (and still are) generally used to devalue novel reading.²⁷

For example, when Thomas Wright declared that certain forms of fiction induce “a depravity of taste under the promptings of which…garbage is preferred to wholesome or delicate food,” there was no notion of conversion or fecundity (27). “Garbage” and food had only an antithetical relation; consuming such texts could only be seen as depravity.²⁸

In this conversion of novels to manure, Friswell's comments highlight the importance of exchangeability in the valuation of the Victorian novel. Even as it was converted into a waste object, Friswell suggests, the value of the novel lies in its ability to be consumed again and again, continually circulating throughout the minds and bodies of its readers.

VII. The Catacombs: (De)valuation and (De)fusion of Economic and Literary Value

MUDIE'S NOVELS may have glowed with color in the Great Hall, represented the nation as they were shipped in their tin boxes over the railways and waterways of the British empire, and tempted patrons to linger over their one-volume (re)incarnations in the outer courts of Mudie's temple, but their cultural biographies also included less prestigious, and less visible, spaces and statuses. Below the decorative atmosphere of the Great Hall lay Mudie's vaults and catacombs, “extending not only beneath the premises occupied by the firm, but also beneath portions of the contiguous Talbot Mansions in Museum Street” (Preston 671). As William Preston conducted his readers on their guided tour of Mudie's Library, his descent from the “spacious and very lofty” Great Hall to the “Catacombs” is a movement from light and order into darkness and confusion:

The Catacombs were in many ways the opposite of the Great Hall–novels stored here were neither in demand nor on display, and so their literary value and commodity potential were more easily brought into question. The groaning which Preston imagines comes not from an unjust or tortured imprisonment, but rather from the “thousands and ten of thousands of volumes whose aggregate weight, albeit that they are ‘light’ literature, must amount to many tons” (671). The weight of so many volumes testifies to their physical existence as objects whose use value has been exhausted–no longer valued as literature, their “light[ness]” has condemned them to obscurity.

And yet in this aggregate weight of used-up, “dead” novels, economic value and literary quality could finally be conjoined in an act of negation. Now, their literary value exhausted and their exchangeability thereby negated, these novels could once again be imagined as commodities, and their literary and economic valuation acknowledged as inter-dependent (and absent):

These objects are un-exchangeable as circulating library novels. They have neither economic nor literary value, and their lack of exchangeability rests on the depletion of their desirability as literary objects: “nobody” wants to read them or buy them. Just as the anonymity of the desired novels in the Great Hall indicated their transformation from commodities to aesthetic objects, titles must not be given in the catacombs. The (de)fusion of economic and literary value also required such anonymity; such respect for the “dead stock” transforms these novels from literary objects to simply concrete, dead things. They are now most remarkable for their weight, only the groaning shelves testify to their existence, and thus they can begin to be thought of as something other than literature. Overburdening the shelves and clogging the catacombs, these books must be exchanged, their use value refigured and economic value realized, as waste products.

Yet, at the moment of the novel's death, Preston curiously elides the actual bodies of the novels themselves with “the weight of authors.” These authors, not the books, become the “prisoners” of Mudie's catacombs, their groans are heard in the night, and the vaults finally serve as tombs for unnamed, forgotten novelists. Friswell sees this as an object lesson in authorial humility, “a visit to these catacombs would be a salutary discipline to many a living author, should success have endangered his humility, showing him how the public are already beginning to pass him by if not to forget his name” (671).

The fate of the author, Friswell implies, is obscurity, anonymity, and finally death. As we have seen, from the moment a novel entered the library, the author's name was mediated, the author's author-ity compromised, by Mudie's power and prestige. It was Mudie's name that was “carried wherever the English tongue is spoken,” and Mudie's label that was “familiar in every English household” (Curwen 430), no matter the name of the author or title of the book. As Mudie's Select Library strove to obscure and deny the commodity potential of its novels, the literary labor-power which went into the production of those texts was occluded by the library's role as owner and disseminator. Only by making the labor of the writer disappear could Mudie's likewise obfuscate the commodity potential of the text.²⁹

Literary value and commodification could be fused and denied in the figure and function of the author.

Within the routines and rhetorical practices of the library, the author's name, like the title of the text, functioned as a marker of selection, enabling the library's staff or patrons to locate, advertise, catalogue, circulate, store, retrieve, praise, and condemn particular objects. Likewise, the author appeared to be indebted to Mudie's, approved and credentialed, even enabled, by the favor of the library, while simultaneously obscured, homogenized, as one of many names/volumes encompassed and assimilated within this voluminous institution. George Moore's charge, that Charles Mudie, “not the ladies and gentlemen who place their names on the title-pages, is the author of modern English fiction,” is thus valid, in the sense that the labor power of the author was lost in the decommodification and recommodification of the novel. Moore compared these authors, Mudie's “employes,” with the workers in a pill-box factory (20): his point was that literary workers should not be treated with the same anonymity, the same disrespect, as unskilled laborers. Yet, the practices of Mudie's Library were not unique in this (dis)respect: indeed, the conditions of literary production could be as alienating as any other form of labor. Mudie's Library may have succeeded (temporarily) in hiding the commodity potential of the novel, but it could not deny the effects of commodification on those who produced the novels in the first place.