SOURCE: Solomon, Charles. “More of Mabel's Love and Victorian Affairs.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (26 February 1984): 4.

In the following review, Solomon offers a negative assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses, describing the work as “fragmented, unfocused, and curiously inconclusive.”

Gay, having written at length about Weimar Germany and the Enlightenment, turns his attention to the manners and morals of the 19th-Century middle class. Here [in The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses] he examines bourgeois sexual attitudes and mores, the first installment in a psychological-historical study of Victorian culture that will run to at least five volumes.

While a more balanced view of the 19th Century is long overdue, Gay seems a little too eager to demolish the popular image of the Victorian middle classes as smug, repressed and hypocritical—an image based at least...