SOURCE: Taylor, Tom. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred, by Peter Gay. Historian 57, no. 1 (autumn 1995): 165–66.

In the following review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred, Taylor praises the breadth of Gay's subject and engaging treatment of his topic, but criticizes the volume for its diffuse focus and lack of cohesive argument.

Starting with a lengthy description of the duelling rituals of German students and continuing through the bullying of Theodore Roosevelt, the debates about capital punishment, the political satire of Gilbert and Sullivan's show tunes, and the violent cartoons of Wilhelm Busch, Peter Gay's latest excursion into a Freudian interpretation of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie [in The Cultivation of Hatred] once again challenges us to reconsider the traditional image of staid and respectable Victorian society. Overall, Gay concludes that much of the civility associated...