SOURCE: Pettingell, Phoebe. “Victorian Lust and Love.” New Leader 61, no. 5 (5 March 1984): 13–15.

In the following excerpt, Pettingell offers a mixed assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses, calling the work a “disappointment.”

By now you have probably heard of Peter Gay's Education of the Senses—a study of the 19th-century “bourgeoisie's sensual life, the shape that its libidinous drives assumed under the pressure of its moral imperatives.” The sensational topics of sex and hypocrisy have certainly aroused the critics. Most have concentrated on descriptions of orgasm from the diary of Mabel Loomis Todd, and statistics on female sexuality from the “Mosher survey” (a Victorian Hite Report). The pictures Gay includes have been a focus of attention, too. One nationally syndicated radio commentary took pains to evoke for listeners the voluptuous nude statues and paintings. It also graphically described an advertisement of the...