Contemporary Literary Criticism | Gay, Peter - Philip Hensher (review date 17 May 1997)

Philip Hensher (review date 17 May 1997)

SOURCE: Hensher, Philip. “The Self is Always with Us.” Spectator 278, no. 8807 (17 May 1997): 35–36.

[In the following review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, Hensher argues that although Gay brings together a huge range of disparate historical material, the volume leaves out important topics and lacks a coherent overall argument.]

Peter Gay's multi-volume history, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, has a great deal in common with the all-inclusive intellectual edifices which his subjects so keenly produced. The 19th century produced uncountable numbers of huge books, summarising the whole of history, the whole of a language's vocabulary, everything that was known or could be known about a subject. The intellectual equivalent of Harrod's, they set a standard for ambitious inquiry which is still very much with us. Peter Gay's...

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