SOURCE: Schaub, Diana. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars, by Peter Gay. Commentary 105, no. 6 (June 1998): 71–73.

In the following review, Schaub criticizes The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars for failing to provide a cohesive picture of bourgeois culture.

“Victorian” and “bourgeois” have become distinctly less acceptable as synonyms for hypocritical and philistine in the wake of the Yale historian Peter Gay's monumental reexamination of 19th-century European and American culture. His revisionist history has taken shape in five volumes bearing the collective title The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. The burden of the whole has been to show the variety and complexity of bourgeois life through a focus on certain fundamental human passions.

Gay's researches into the inner life of the bourgeoisie have yielded volumes on sex and love (Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion), the inclination to...