SOURCE: Pomper, Philip. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume II: The Tender Passion, by Peter Gay. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 3 (winter 1988): 519–20.

In the following review, Pomper offers a mixed assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume II: The Tender Passion.

In Education of the Senses, the first volume of his ambitious project, Gay studied the vicissitudes of the instincts, particularly libido, in the shifting cultural environments of the bourgeois nineteenth century. In The Tender Passion he continues what promises to be a massive study, the later volumes of which will portray the bourgeoisie and liberalism under attack from several quarters. In the present volume, Gay revises the traditional view of Victorian middle-class eroticism. He applies Sigmund Freud to his subject, but not dogmatically. In Gay's view, Freud posed the problem confronting all civilized human beings—that of satisfying their instincts in cultural...