Bürger und Boheme. Kunstkriege des 19. Jahrhunderts.

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud #5

by Peter Gay

The Victorians we meet in this volume range from the capitalists in the top tier of the bourgeoisie, eager to be recognized as gentlemen, to the clerks and craftsmen fearful of sinking into the proletariat. Peter Gay's aim throughout this sweeping work of cultural history is to widen our perception of Victorian bourgeois life, to replace monochromatic generalizations with revealing portraits of men and women in all the colorful complexity of their lives.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

438 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Reviews

[Frederick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously, I made a mistake by entering into a series of books at a point other than at the beginning. This is a very informative book about the relationship of the Victorian Bourgeoisie with art, literature, and music. It is difficult to get through but if you are willing to take the time it does provide context, background for understanding nineteenth century Europe's psychology. Gay's devotion to Freud, though, is maddening. He gives far too much importance to Freud's work, not just in a cultural context, but in an absolute scientific context and that is where Gay's arguments break down. No, I do not believe that Freud's philosophies contain, "a theory of politics, a theory of art, and, even more daunting, a theory of culture,'' at least not on the level that Gay imagines. (235)

[Lori Widmer Bean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh god, this was dry. I got four pages in, and only because I forced it. I'll pick it up some other day - when I'm incredibly bored.

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is book five of the five volume series. Yes, I have read them all. If I had to recommend two I would recommend the first volume(sex) and the third volume(agression). I feel that I should be awarded some sort of prize for completing this task.

I struggled with this volume, even though it is the shortest (240 pp.) by far of the five. Perhaps that's because the theme: bourgeois taste in art, was so dreadfully boring. There's not a single chapter I really enjoyed until the (last) chapter on the emergence of moderning. Or maybe that was because I was so close to the end.

So now I know plenty about the Victorian bourgeois. What can you say about them? That they defy easy categorization. But really, can't you say that about many subjects? Gay's focus on the journals of every day bourgeois as source material was fine, but over five volumes, I could have used some more "great men" and current events.