Contemporary Literary Criticism | Gay, Peter - Richard Jenkyns (review date 30 November 1995)

Richard Jenkyns (review date 30 November 1995)

SOURCE: Jenkyns, Richard. “Victoria's Secret.” New York Review of Books 42, no. 19 (30 November 1995): 19–21.

[In the following review of Patricia Anderson's When Passions Reigned and The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, Jenkyns comments on the vast scope and wealth of interesting details in Gay's work.]

Sixty or seventy years ago the word “Victorian” was used by many cultivated people as a term of abuse: it seemed self-evident that the Victorians' art was either hideous or odiously sentimental, and their prudishness a moral deformity. Walking through Kensington Gardens, the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood had a revelation: as he looked at the Albert Memorial, he decided that ugliness could be a spiritual evil; not to be disgusted by this monstrosity was to be stunted as a human being. Yet in the 1960s it was being used...

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