Roberts 2006

Roberts, Lewis. “Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34.1 (2006): 1–25. Print.*

• 1: …the format and price of many Victorian novels precluded (and indeed discouraged) even wealthy readers from actually owning such texts. The three-volume novel was a very specialized commodity, not simply a product to be sold in a capitalist market, but an object whose value was determined solely through its relations to the circulating library system.
• 2: 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.
• 3: 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[.]
• 3-4: 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. 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…. 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.
• 5: …an examination of the various positions which a novel occupied as it travelled through the library provides a good example of how the conflicts between economic and literary value in Victorian society.
• 7: It is this service [purchasing right to borrow, the exchangeability of the text] 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 practice of Mudie’s Library distanced the commodity potential of the novel in some way, just as the novels themselves were displayed and distanced from the patrons in the Great Hall.
• 10: …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.
• 12: This is “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 “no library” could possibly contain.
• 14: 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 a national institution which represented Great Britain in its scope, power, and efficiency.
• 17: The novel’s sojourn through Mudie’s Library was in itself a temporal process, and the emphasis which Mudie’s placed on “new novels” meant that a novel’s desirability and exchangability would soon depreciate. J.A. Sutherland notes that “unlike pies, books do not disappear once they are consumed”: the huge quantities of novels purchased by Mudie’s may have been caused 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.” …This change in format from three- to one-volume marked a transition in the novel’s exchangeability.
• 18: 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”. 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.” [Qting from Friswell]