Use it or lose it: has the public library had its day?

I write this in a garret a few doors down from the public library in Muswell Hill, north London. It is a nice irony that a century and a half ago, on the site where the free-to-join municipal library now stands, was a villa owned by one Charles Edward Mudie. In the mid-19th century, Mudie had amassed a fortune by establishing a hugely successful lending library where subscribers could either pay a guinea a year to borrow as many books as they could read, or take the pay-as-you-go option of a shilling a book.

For purely commercial reasons, Mudie was a staunch supporter of novels that were long enough (c.200,000 words) that they needed to be broken up into three separate volumes, and his influence was such that publishers would insist that writers bulk out their narratives accordingly. As the authors of The Library put it: ‘If we ever wonder why so many 19th-century novels lose themselves in the middle passage with a convoluted love story between two marginal characters, we should blame Charles Edward Mudie.’