Mundella was born in Leicester to an Italian father and English mother. He worked in the hosiery trade and became a partner in the Nottingham firm of Hine and Mundella.
The system of price regulation which as President of the Board of Trade he imposed upon rail freight was a disaster for the railways and, in the longer term, for the railways' customers. It was based on the fallacious but widely held assumption that the cost of moving a ton of freight was proportional to the distance moved. In fact, the cost per ton mile depends mainly on the number of tons being carried and the amount of loading and unloading involved. It does not cost very much more to move 100 tons 100 miles than to move 1 ton.
The practical consequence was that the railways had to turn away traffic that could be efficiently and profitably moved by rail whilst they were not permitted to raise prices for unprofitable traffic.
