From 1842, when Charles Edward Mudie started lending books at his shop in Bloomsbury, until 1894 when the Library Establishment destroyed the three-decker, fiction maintained a recognized supremacy in the English world of letters. Between 1845 and 1870, when the potential earning power of the novel developed enormously, when literary critics saw the novel as the nineteenth century replacement for the epic and even the drama, when interest in fiction was sharpened by careful and copious criticism, when the novelist was demanding the right to be judged as a serious critic of life, Mudie's contributed essential elements by providing a central distributing agency and by the development of a cohesive body of readers. The circulating library had a significant influence on the Victorian literary milieu, and by championing the three-decker on the construction of novels themselves. For the student of the Victorian era, the institution that was Mudie's left a lasting imprint on authors, publishers, and the reading public, which this volume explores within the context of Victorian literary tastes and values.