SOURCE: Porter, Roy. “The Times' Ire.” New Statesman & Society 7, no. 299 (22 April 1994): 37, 39.

In the following review, Porter offers a mixed assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred.

There's a temptation to say of this book: this made me real mad! That wouldn't be quite right, but there's something deeply frustrating about it all the same. Written by one of America's top historians, it contains a mass of fascinating material yet fails to form a satisfying whole.

The trouble stems in part from the larger and wildly ambitious enterprise of which The Cultivation of Hatred is just a fragment. Back in the early 1980s, the Yale professor conceived the brilliant idea of surveying the emotional life of the “Victorians” (not just in Britain, but on the Continent and in America too). Instead of another dreary analysis of “public opinion,” Gay would probe Victorian...