![]() ![]() ![]() The books are full of obscure and often surprising information, most notably about bourgeois sexuality, which he argued, with a wealth of examples drawn from diaries and letters of the time, was far from being as prudish as popular memory imagined.Ĭovering subjects as varied as love and marriage, art collecting and connoisseurship, attitudes to crime and deviance (dealt with in a pathbreaking volume on The Cultivation of Hatred), literature and much more besides, the volumes can be criticised for omitting such central preoccupations and pastimes as politics, music, respectability and so on. In his encyclopedic The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (five volumes between 19), Gay explored in wonderfully readable prose a wide range of aspects of the European – especially the British, French and German – and the North American middle classes in their heyday. The first volume, subtitled The Rise of Modern Pagansim, of Peter Gay’s massive study, was widely acclaimed far beyond the academic world ![]()
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