Contemporary Literary Criticism | Gay, Peter - Michael D. Pratt (review date winter 1997)

Michael D. Pratt (review date winter 1997)

SOURCE: Pratt, Michael D. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, by Peter Gay. Historian 59, no. 2 (winter 1997): 463.

[In the following review, Pratt offers a positive assessment of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart.]

This book [The Naked Heart] is the fourth volume of the author's projected five-volume study of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. In this volume, Peter Gay seeks to reveal the inner life of a people whose consciousness, for all appearances, was focused steadily on the external world. This was, after all, the age of expansion and progress, with its new modes of transportation and communication, its burgeoning industry, its nation building, and that monument to materialism—the Crystal Palace. The author demonstrates that beneath the hustle-bustle, the bourgeois were at...

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