SOURCE: Johnson, Paul. “Sex and Society.” Commentary 77 (June 1984): 68–71.

In the following mixed review, Johnson argues that The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses contains several new and interesting details, but notes that the work is presented as a collection of miscellany that lacks a defined subject, theme, and structure.

We are promised that this [The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses] is the first installment of “a project of enormous scope,” a “multivolume study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820's to the outbreak of World War I.” Actually, it is an extensive but not particularly systematic survey of sexuality in the 19th century. Peter Gay is an ambitious and unusually wide-ranging historian of culture, and no one can fail to admire the industry with which he seeks knowledge and his zest in communicating it...