The Bourgeois Experience

• The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Volume 2, The Tender Passion
  Peter Gay. 490 pp. (Oxford University Press, 1987)

This second volume in Professor Gay's great enterprise forms a sequel to Education of the Senses (1984). Like its predecessor it is a dazzling feat. The very attempt to chart bourgeois sexual life in many countries over the period from 1820 to 1914 compels admiration; and at the end of the second round a standing ovation is surely in order for the great scholar who commands the learning, the acuteness, and the unflagging zest which this enormous task demands.