Mudie's Circulating Library

Dinah Mulock published her three-volume novel A Life for a Life anonymously, but her authorship was known. Mudie's Library carried 2,500 copies.

George Henry Lewes persuaded Blackwood to undertake this unusual mode of publication, because Middlemarch was too long to fit the three-volume format which was by now the staple of the circulating library. They hoped to...

Their circle of friends included the critic and historian George Lillie Craik , Camilla Toulmin , John Westland Marston , Alexander Macmillan (the publisher), Charles Edward Mudie (founder of Mudie's Lending Library ), and the...