SOURCE: Kaye, Howard L. “Peter Gay's The Bourgeois Experience: The Return of the Repressed.” Society 36, no. 5 (July–August 1999): 90–93.

In the following review, Kaye describes the five volumes of Gay's The Bourgeois Experience as “sprawling and fascinating,” but argues that the series as a whole lacks cohesion.

With the recent publication of Pleasure Wars, Peter Gay has brought to completion his remarkable attempt to recapture the complex inner lives of the much maligned middle classes during the extended nineteenth century from the end of the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War. When the project began over a quarter-century ago, the Victorian bourgeoisie throughout the Western world were essentially objects of mockery and scorn. Little more than cardboard figures, they were routinely denounced for their materialism and shallowness, their sexual anesthesia and hypocrisy, their sanctimonious moralizing and smug self-satisfaction. But with these five sprawling and fascinating...