SOURCE: Sennett, Richard. “The Passions of Polite Society.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (7 November 1993): 3, 12.

In the following review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred, Sennett maintains that Gay's work “provides a magisterial portrait,” but comments that the work's theme is unfocused.

During the last decade Peter Gay has given us an entirely new picture of our great-grandparents. While we may have envisioned them as living in the soft-focus gentility of a Merchant-Ivory film, the Yale historian has shown them to have been far more open to erotic and violent experience. Gay has done so in three volumes which began, in 1984, with a study of Victorian sensuality; two years later Gay published a book on the ways of love in the 19th Century. This new book [The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred] concerns the opposite side...