The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud

Gay believes that the Victorian bourgeoisie, and 19th-century Europe's middle classes generally, were much more introspective and prone to self-exploration than is commonly assumed. Using the autobiographies or memoirs of John Stuart Mill, George Sand, Goethe, Edmund Gosse and Thomas Carlyle, he charts a passion for self-scrutiny that made public these writers' inner struggles with belief, faith and emotion. His survey of private letters and diaries subverts the notion that Victorians regarded the male as coolly reasoning and the female as an emotional being. Yale history professor emeritus Gay (The Enlightenment) argues that Dickens, Henry James, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy enlarged the inner domain, while Eugene Sue, French serial novelist, and Karl May, German producer of potboilers, also nourished middle-class fantasies and helped shape identities. Among painters, he spotlights individualists such as Van Gogh, Courbet, James Ensor and Caspar David Friedrich, who gave fresh impetus to self-revelation. This fourth volume in Gay's The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud is a scholarly yet engrossing, enormously rich exploration of 19th-century self-discovery. (Sept.)