SOURCE: Cannadine, David. “The Victorian Sex Wars.” New York Review of Books 31, no. 1 (2 February 1984): 19–22.

In the following review, Cannadine offers a positive assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses, noting that the work “promises to be one of the major historical enterprises of the decade.”

“Historically,” Karl Marx once wrote, “the bourgeoisie has played a most important part.” Indeed, there was a period in historical writing, roughly coincidental with the first half of the twentieth century, when it seemed to play virtually the only part, credited as it often was with most of the major developments in the making of the modern world: from the growth of towns, the decline of feudalism, and the waning of the Middle Ages, via the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution, the consolidation of absolutist states, the English civil war and the Enlightenment, the...