The first circulating library in London was founded by Wright, a bookseller of 132, Strand, about the year 1730. Franklin, writing of a time some five years previous to this, says:—“While I lodged in Little Britain, I formed an acquaintance with a bookseller of the name of Wilcox, whose shop was next door to me. Circulating libraries were not then in use. We agreed that for a reasonable retribution, of which I have forgotten the price, I should have free access to his library, and take what books I pleased, which I was to return when I had read them.” Among Wright’s earliest rivals were the Nobles, John Bell (the cheap publisher), Thomas Lowndes, and notably Samuel Bathoe, who died in 1768, and to whom, erroneously, the credit of the innovation has been very generally attributed. As late, however, as 1770, there were only four real circulating libraries in the capital.
The practice soon spread through the country. Shortly after Wright’s death, Hatton established a circulating library at Birmingham. In 1745, Watts introduced a circulating library into Cambridge, greatly extended afterwards by John Nicholson, known by the sobriquet of “Maps,” who used to carry a sack of books to each undergraduate’s rooms, in case they felt a sudden inclination for reading something newer than Homer, Xenophon, or Euclid. By the year 1755 we find that circulating libraries had extended to the extreme north of England, for Newcastle then boasted the possession of two.
Though the custom was rapidly obtaining in town and country, the books lent out to read were generally very similar in title to those in the famous list in the “Rivals,” which caused Sir Anthony Absolute’s condemnation—“A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms throughout the year. And depend on it, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last.” We have still only to go to our little country towns and petty watering-places—few now, fortunately, still beyond the arm of “Smith” or “Mudie”—to see the circulating library in its pristine form.
At first the benefits that must inevitably accrue from the movement to the publishers as well as to the public were by no means recognized. Lackington tells us that “when the circulating libraries were first opened the booksellers were most alarmed, but experience has proved that the sale of books, so far from being diminished thereby, has been most greatly increased.”
Under the care of Hookham and Eber, these circulating libraries did undoubtedly improve, for the proprietors now began to consider the wants of students as well as the idle pleasure of loungers who thought with Gray that the acmé of human happiness consisted in lying upon a sofa reading the latest licentious novelties of Crébillon fils and his genus. The movement was further accelerated by the foundation of book-clubs, the first of which is said to have sprung out of Burn’s “Bachelor’s Club.” For forty or fifty years these book-clubs did good service in the cause of education and progress, especially under the fostering care of Mr. Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; but soon an organizing genius arose who was not only to render book-clubs, save those affiliated to his own, unnecessary, but was to develop the full power of co-operation in the circulating library itself. And his advent was favoured by a wonderfully extended system of transport through the agency of the railways.
Charles Edward Mudie was born in the year 1818, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where his father kept a little newspaper shop, at which stationery and other articles were retailed, and where books of the fugitive fiction class could be borrowed at the usual suburban charge of a penny the volume.
Charles Edward Mudie, founder of Mudie’s Library.
Mr. Mudie’s education was, as he says, “properly cared for,” and he stayed at home assisting in his father’s business until he was twenty-two years of age; and even in his early days he made it his great ambition to possess a circulating library of his own, declaring that when once he was started he would be second to none.
In the year 1840, he opened a little shop in Upper King Street, Bloomsbury, and he carried on precisely the same trade as his father did in Cheyne Walk. By degrees, however, he neglected the newspaper and general stationery business, and devoted himself more exclusively to the circulating library, which he increased at such a rapid rate that the father became alarmed at the speculative spirit of his son. In 1842, Mr. Mudie commenced his system of lending out one exchangeable volume to subscribers at the rate of a guinea per annum; and as he made the addition of every new work, immediately upon its publication, a feature in his establishment, he produced an entire revolution in the circulating library movement, and was rewarded by a rapidly increasing number of subscribers. Nor did he at this early period confine his dealings solely to circulating the books of other publishers. He was himself in some instances a publisher, and from his establishment issued the first English edition of James R. Lowell’s “Poems,” and Mr. George Dawson’s first “Orations.”