TY - JOUR AB - By the 1880s, the Reading Room of the British Museum in Bloomsbury provided opportunities for networking, writing, and reading among many middle-class women including Amy Levy, Eleanor Marx, and Clementina and Constance Black. Attempting to promote a similar egalitarian space for acquiring knowledge for working-class ‘rough readers’ was Walter Besant’s People’s Palace Library in Mile End. This essay explores the library work of Constance Black [Garnett] at the People’s Palace where collisions across class reveal the challenges of East End reform in contrast to the celebration of a democratic reading room at the British Museum celebrated by Levy in her 1889 essay. AU - Susan Bernstein DA - 2012/1// DO - 10.16995/ntn.632 IS - 13 VL - 0 PB - Open Library of Humanities PY - 2012 TI - Reading Room Geographies of Late-Victorian London: The British Museum, Bloomsbury and the People’s Palace, Mile End T2 - 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century UR - http://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1660/ ER -