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Rating: 
Summary: A rather unpleasant survey of the 19th Century
Review: I've read this book twice, and I think I have some idea of what the author is trying to say now. (Mind you, I said I think). The book is not a mere impressionistic pastiche (like Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence). Mr. Gay is actually trying to say something. The simplest way I can explain what that something is as I understand it is to write it out as succinctly as I know how: The Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, their ascendency coinciding as it did with the ascendency of that new social class, the bourgeoisie, influenced society far more than is realized today...Shelley, for instance, whose name was considered unmentionable during his lifetime, became the model of what a poet should be by the end of the century, the ultra-respectable Robert Browning one of his greatest fans. All this fascination with the Romantics among the populace caused the society at large to look inward just when, paradoxically, vast strides were being made in what I guess we'll call the material instead of spiritual realm.-First off, I have to give my whole-hearted approval to the importance placed on Shelley as a cultural influence, just as Gay's Yale colleague Harold Bloom resurrected the importance of his literary influence. Indeed, the two men are the only ones I know of to describe Dickens' work as more "magical" than "realistic."-But Gay's writing and his tone are not pretty. I mean, he seems to have some bile built up against the age he is describing. Unlike Bloom, he seems pertly averse to the inward-directedness of the 19th century, and his writing on it frequently verges on mockery. As he says (sneers) on page eight of the introduction, "...what is the self that Victorian bourgeois seemed so intent on discovering and defining?"-The Naked Heart?-The problems I have with this book are that a)There is a lack of urbanity or even drollery that leave one emotionally deflated after reading it; b)Gay never delves into what is wrong, per se, with what we nowadays call spiritual searching; c)Much of the writing is just plain bad-Perhaps Gay expects us to take from the book's title that something is seriously wrong with a society preoccupied with uncovering something so personal.-The book is confounding in all these respects. Really, when it comes down to it Mr Gay seems to be saying (ever so subtly) that Victorian "culture," as it were, was a sentimental waste of time.-You have to have grown pretty bald on the pate to write something so....heartless.
Rating:
Summary: A rather unpleasant survey of the 19th Century
Review: I've read this book twice, and I think I have some idea of what the author is trying to say now. (Mind you, I said I think). The book is not a mere impressionistic pastiche (like Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence). Mr. Gay is actually trying to say something. The simplest way I can explain what that something is as I understand it is to write it out as succinctly as I know how: The Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, their ascendency coinciding as it did with the ascendency of that new social class, the bourgeoisie, influenced society far more than is realized today...Shelley, for instance, whose name was considered unmentionable during his lifetime, became the model of what a poet should be by the end of the century, the ultra-respectable Robert Browning one of his greatest fans. All this fascination with the Romantics among the populace caused the society at large to look inward just when, paradoxically, vast strides were being made in what I guess we'll call the material instead of spiritual realm.-First off, I have to give my whole-hearted approval to the importance placed on Shelley as a cultural influence, just as Gay's Yale colleague Harold Bloom resurrected the importance of his literary influence. Indeed, the two men are the only ones I know of to describe Dickens' work as more "magical" than "realistic."-But Gay's writing and his tone are not pretty. I mean, he seems to have some bile built up against the age he is describing. Unlike Bloom, he seems pertly averse to the inward-directedness of the 19th century, and his writing on it frequently verges on mockery. As he says (sneers) on page eight of the introduction, "...what is the self that Victorian bourgeois seemed so intent on discovering and defining?"-The Naked Heart?-The problems I have with this book are that a)There is a lack of urbanity or even drollery that leave one emotionally deflated after reading it; b)Gay never delves into what is wrong, per se, with what we nowadays call spiritual searching; c)Much of the writing is just plain bad-Perhaps Gay expects us to take from the book's title that something is seriously wrong with a society preoccupied with uncovering something so personal.-The book is confounding in all these respects. Really, when it comes down to it Mr Gay seems to be saying (ever so subtly) that Victorian "culture," as it were, was a sentimental waste of time.-You have to have grown pretty bald on the pate to write something so....heartless.
Rating: 
Summary: Intellectually exciting!
Review: If you enjoy reading about the XIX century, its artistic, literary and mind revolutions, read this book. Dont worry if it is a forth volume of a collection... one doesnt depend on the other. Here you find the intellectual anxieties of the middle class in Europe, the search of themselves in music, paintings and books. Peter Gay leads you in a trip to the XIX century... and he goes further... till reach the naked heart of those who shaped the Contemporary Age.
Rating: 
Summary: evocative, if not P. Gay's best
Review: Peter Gay returns, after a decade immersed in study of Freud's public and private writings, to grand history on the scale of his earlier twin volumes on the Enlightenment. His lengthy psychoanalytic introduction is worth enduring (or skipping past).Freudian excesses aside, Gay has much to offer from the annals of the nineteenth century, and he serves it up with characteristic gusto. Education of the Senses explores the suppressed and emphatically un-suppressed sexual ideations of a time at once remote in its censorship and near in its moral conflicts. Though more silent than the Victorian Age itself on the subject of sexual inverts (a term for those we would now call gays and lesbians) P. Gay covers other topics, such as dreams, medicine, pornography, autoeroticism, and marital relations, with an unabashed and erudite pen. For those interested in Victorian sexuality, this is essential reading, especially if complemented by a more recent volume or two, perhaps To Believe in Women. Do not expect a treatment of traditional political or military history. This is scholarly cultural history steeped in a strong theoretical tradition.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Social/Cultural History of the Bourgeois (vol 1)
Review: Seems to me that the reviews Amazon has above do not refer to volume one of this landmark five volume history of the bourgeois. Same goes for at least one of the reviews below.
This series by Peter Gay chronicles the "Bourgeois Century", roughly 1820 to the first world war. Gay's approach is anchored by a commitment to Freudian theory and a cross-cultural approach that takes in British, French, German and American culture with equal interest.
His scholarship is careful and nuanced. He draws equally adeptly from primary and secondary materials and this volume see saws between able synthesis and novel (re) interpretations of primary sources.
As the subtitle states, this volume focuses on "the education of the senses", which is a euphimism for the process by which a young victorian (man) learns about sex. That is not to say that Gay focuses exclusively on the experience of men, far from it.
Education of the Senses begins with a general introduction that I assume applies to all five volumes. Gay is careful to explain the background of the nineteenth century: i.e. that it was a period of ferocious change and that people were greatly affected and disturbed by that change.
The subtitle of Education of the Senses is "Bourgeois Experiences, I: An Erotic Record", and that it precisely the territory covered by this volume.
First off, he discusses the diary of Mabel Loomis Todd, an east coast American bourgeois. Her story is that of the woman who marries and is unfaithful to her husband. Gay uses her experience to demonstrate that the sex life of the Victorian was more complicated then previous scholars thought (this is the overriding theme of all of his work in this area).
Gay marches through Bourgeois attitudes towards sex within marriage (i.e. women were not sexually anthesthic), the role of feminism in Victorian culture, the place of birth control and birth, the role of the medical establishment in promoting half truths about sex, the place of pornography and the place of private family life, among several other topics.
Gay is judicious in his use of Freudian theory, I found it interesting, not overwhelming or dogmatic. His writing style is fluid. First rate cultural history. Can't wait for volume two, though I probably will wait for a while...
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