Mudie's Select Library, which was opened in the back of a London stationer's shop in 1842 by the young publisher Charles Edward Mudie, had risen by the end of the century to become the largest and most successful commercial lending library in Britain. Circulating libraries such as Mudie's, Smith's, and Boots were immensely important players within the Victorian publishing ecosystem, due to their position as the main buyers and suppliers of newly-published fiction to the public - or at least, to those members of the public who could afford their subscription rates. With both the most extensive collection and the lowest subscription fees of any circulating library, Mudie's was perhaps the most influential supplier of books to the public during the Victorian era.
This database provides a digital record of Mudie's library holdings, based on 8 of the library's surviving catalogues. Indexing over 22,000 novels which appeared in the library's catalogues between 1848 and 1907, Mudie's Library Online not only gives an overview of the library in its entirety, but provides insight into the life cycle of each individual title as it passed into, and sometimes out of, the collection.
Mudie's Library Online was developed as part of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project VICTEUR - European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture, a collaboration between the UCD School of English and the SFI-funded Insight Centre for Data Analytics.
