19th century England: The most famous of these organizations, Mudie's, while never a monopoly, came very close to being one, with the result that the decision by Mudie's to buy or reject a novel often determined the fate of the book. The pressure thereby placed upon publishers to conform to the standards imposed by Mudie's made virtually impossible the honest treatment of thematic material by authors. The clashes of authors with their publishers are too numerous to mention, but the famous works that were excluded from the circulating libraries comprise a list of classic English fiction. George Gissing's "New Grub Street" is a vivid fictional account of an author unable to find a market for his work because of the tyranny of the system. George Moore's "Esther Waters", Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure", H.G. Well's "Ann Veronica" and Compton MacKenzie's "Sinister Street" were only four of the titles around the turn of the twentieth century which were excluded from circulating libraries.
Source: Banned Books 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D., by Anne Lyon Haight, and Chandler B. Grannis, R.R. Bowker Co, 1978.