Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/464

424 424 CHARLES EDWARD MUDIE. 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 circu- lating 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 acme of human happiness consisted in lying upon a sofa reading the latest licentious novelties of Crebillon fils and his genus. The movement was further accelerated by the founda- tion 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, unneces- sary, but was to develop the full power of co-opera- tion 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. 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 ambi- tion to possess a circulating library of his own, declar-