Charles Edward Mudie , English publisher and founder of Mudie's Lending Library and Mudie's Subscription Library, was the son of a second-hand bookseller and newsagent. Mudie's efficient distribution system and vast supply of texts revolutionized the circulating library movement, while his "select" library influenced Victorian middle-class values and the structure of the three-volume novel. He was also the first publisher of James Russell Lowell's poems in England, and of Emerson's Man Thinking.
Mudie by Frederick Waddy (1872)
Sketch of the interior of Mudie's Lending Library, 509, 510 & 511 New Oxford Street, London.
The three-volume novel was a standard form of publishing for British fiction during the nineteenth century. It was a significant stage in the development of the modern novel as a form of popular literature in Western culture.
The title page of the first volume of the three-volume, first edition of Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins (1872)
The first page of chapter one from the 3rd (three-volume) edition of 1818 compared with the same page of the single-volume 1906 Everyman's Library Edition of Rob Roy.