By Karen Wade
Published in Irish University Review, 2026.
Link

Abstract

In 1891, Rosa Mulholland expressed her regret at observing that Irish writers, upon publishing a successful first novel, inevitably abandoned the country in order to ‘live their lives pleasantly and in affluent circumstances in the busy, working, paying world of London’. For Irish writers of the later nineteenth century, the physical (not to mention conceptual) relocation that Mulholland depicts as inevitable was often spurred by the need for easy access to the infrastructure of the publishing industry, much of which was centred around the publishing hubs of London and Edinburgh. However, such a move did not necessarily guarantee future success or stability. This article considers the careers of three nineteenth-century Irish writers, Annie French Hector, Justin McCarthy, and Charlotte Riddell, through their interactions with two major London literary institutions: Mudie's Select Library, one of the most prominent suppliers of fiction to the Victorian reading public, and the Royal Literary Fund, which provided bursaries to struggling writers. Records drawn from a large-scale data analysis of Mudie's catalogues suggest that these authors felt obliged to comply with the library's well-known preferences, but at times could also leverage previous successes in order to make unconventional commercial or literary choices. By contrast, the archive of the Royal Literary Fund emphasises the precarity inherent in the novelist's career, while also rendering visible the ways in which these writers understood the moral and ethical aspects of their work. Such data-rich literary histories, when read alongside these writers’ (semi-) autobiographical works, contribute to our understanding of how Irish writers navigated London-based publishing markets in the late nineteenth century, and how they conceptualised their professional roles and obligations, both toward their audiences and to others within their community.