SOURCE: Lang, Timothy. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, by Peter Gay. Victorian Studies 40, no. 1 (autumn 1996): 158–60.

In the following review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, Lang comments on the “panoramic vision” Gay brings to his subject matter.

Peter Gay is best known today for rethinking the cultural history of the bourgeoisie and for his firmly held conviction that psychoanalytically informed history is both desirable and feasible. For almost two decades, Gay has been engaged in a project of truly Victorian proportions aimed at rescuing the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie from its detractors. Our present preoccupation with writing the history of the working class has done the middle class a disservice. In our well-intentioned effort to do justice to workers, we have created an image of the bourgeoisie that is based more on caricature than understanding. It...