SOURCE: McDonald, Forrest. “Victoria's Secrets.” National Review 45, no. 22 (15 November 1993): 56–57.

In the following review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred, McDonald addresses a number of alleged weaknesses in Gay's historical scholarship.

To the educated middle class in the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that virtue must be taught and learned—that “natural” man, contrary to the Rousseauean myth, was a savage and not a noble one. So assuming, vast numbers of writers, preachers, philosophers, and scientists devised theories and rules of conduct and social conventions that would tame the beast in man. In The Cultivation of Hatred, the third of a projected seven volumes on bourgeois culture in the Victorian era, Peter Gay attempts to describe one broad aspect of the undertaking, that aimed at controlling man's presumed natural inclination toward violence. Mr. Gay unnecessarily compounds the difficulties of his task...