Peter Gay
Pleasure Wars
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
The concluding volume in Peter Gay's magisterial study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of World War I.
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.
"Rich in its accounting for the often surprising details, the necessary 'facts' (among them much newly discovered material), sovereign in its generalizing interpretations, elegant in its presentation, and revisionist in its central thesis, this volume is a 'must' for anyone interested in the history of the 'bourgeois century.' "—Reinhold Brinkmann, Harvard University
"Like everything Peter Gay writes, Pleasure Wars is a great delight — and much more!"—Robert Heilbroner
Peter Gay is director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. The two previous volumes of The Bourgeois Experience—The Cultivation of Hatred and The Naked Heart — are also available in Norton paperback editions.
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