Volume 49, Number 8 · May 9, 2002
The Shock of the Old
By Graham Robb
Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle- Class Culture, 1815–1914
by Peter Gay
Norton, 334 pp., $27.95
For some time now, the cultural historian Peter Gay has been one of the most prolific and most convincing apologists for that remote, maligned age, the nineteenth century. His approach is practical rather than theoretical, corrective rather than revisionist. He has a refreshing ability to separate insights—especially Freud's—from the systems of thought that produced them. In his five-volume history of the Victorian middle classes, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984–1998), he relegates local, academic debate to bibliographical essays that generously ignore the small-minded and the tendentious. This leaves more room for historical information. It enables him to convey with unusual efficiency what we hope to find in cultural history: the romance of the commonplace and the shock of the old, not to mention the ordinariness of romance and the tedium of daily life, even in an age of rapid change.
Review, 3389 words
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