In the Victorian era, the cost of novels exceeded the means of most middle-class Englishmen, so popular lending libraries like Mudie's had a strong influence over the public — and thus over authors and publishers. Mudie's demands that fiction novels be suited to the middle-class family controlled the morality, subject, and scope of the novel for fifty years. His "select" books were carefully chosen with these considerations in mind; once the Mudie Library considered a book unfit for its customers, other libraries followed suit. The rise of the three-volume novel can be directly attributed to this influence, and Mudie's refusal to stock immoral books and "novels of questionable character or inferior quality", such as George Moore's "A Modern Lover" (1883), "A Mummer's Wife" (1885) and "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), also had an effect on the direction of Victorian literature.