SOURCE: Binion, Rudolph. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, by Peter Gay. Journal of Social History 30, no. 2 (winter 1996): 556–57.

In the following mixed review, Binion describes Gay's treatment of his topic in The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart as “rummaging through cultural history.”

The Naked Heart is the fourth volume of a continuing series by Peter Gay named The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Both titles are misleading. The Naked Heart is about cultural trends and personalities far more than experience, let alone experience specifically or typically bourgeois. Its time frame extends back half a century before Victoria mounted the throne. Even adjectivally Victoria evokes Britain, less Germany, and still less France; Gay deals with the three equally, however, and almost exclusively though his series title rings universal. His phrase “the naked heart” (adapted from Baudelaire) announces...