SOURCE: Gibson, Boyd. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, by Peter Gay. Christian Century 113, no. 27 (25 September 1996): 909–10.

In the following positive review, Gibson describes The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart as a creative interdisciplinary study.

Peter Gay characterizes his five-volume study of the 19th-century bourgeoisie as a “symphonic treatment.” His fourth volume [The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart] is an engaging and creatively orchestrated interdisciplinary movement of that symphony. As a historian he follows his own advice to view the 19th century first from the perspective of how it pictured and judged itself before offering one's own conclusions.

What was the “naked heart” of these bourgeois? It was Innerlichkeit: introspection and self-evaluation. The Victorians often were in the grip of polarities—love and hate, pleasures and traumas, openness and guarded privacy, and...