SOURCE: Robinson, Paul. “Sex, Please, We're Victorians.” New Republic 190, no. 5 (6 February 1984): 28–30.

In the following review, Robinson offers a positive assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses, praising Gay's extensive use of primary historical sources.

Peter Gay is among the most productive and venturesome of living historians. He is best known as a student of the European Enlightenment, on which he published five books between 1959 and 1970. More recently he has written extensively on the culture of modernism. In his new book he assaults the terrain lying between these two enterprises: Education of the Senses is a study of middle-class sexuality from Victoria to Freud. It is, moreover, the first of five promised volumes that, taken together, will survey nineteenth-century bourgeois culture in its entirety.

The book covers a great deal of ground, drawing on a wide range of materials and arguing its...