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Who is Charles Edward Mudie?

Charles Edward Mudie (1818-1890) didn’t publish, advertise, lend or sell “novels of questionable character or inferior quality” such as those by George Moore. Yet he played an outsize role in Moore’s development as an author.

Mudie’s adamant refusal to promote Moore’s debut novel, A Modern Lover (1883), drove publisher Henry Vizetelly to adopt the one-volume, six-shilling format for Moore’s second novel, A Mummer’s Wife (1885). It was a risky move to circumvent commercial lending libraries altogether, and it worked.

George Moore’s pamphlet attacking Mudie appeared after the commercial success of A Mummer’s Wife, but it didn’t change the bookseller’s policies.

In 1888, Henry Vizetelly compiled and privately printed another pamphlet on a similar subject: Extracts principally from English Classics: showing that the legal suppression of M. Zola s novels would logically involve the Bowdlerizing of some of the greatest works in English Literature. George Moore was not the author.