For instance, she had warm feelings toward the Jews, dating from the days when she stayed as a child in Sir Moses Montefiore’s house in Rams-gate. In many ways Victoria herself was most un-“Victorian,” with much wider sympathies than most of her subjects, and especially the official and ruling classes. From 1868 on, the first Gladstone government ended the Victorian consensus, if there ever was one and the financial crisis and agricultural distress of the late 1870’s introduced a new age of economic change and social strain. Her personal impact was really limited to the period when she was under the influence of Prince Albert, that is, from the early 1840’s to his death in 1861. A change in tone toward religiosity and public decorum had set in long before Victoria came to the throne. I am coming to believe that the term “Victorian,” which was coined in its popular, pejorative sense by Bloomsbury intellectuals, ought to be avoided by historians, even in reference to English history.
Let us take the three elements in turn: “Victoria,” “Freud,” “Bourgeois.” The title of the larger project, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, gives the game away. It lacks a pervasive theme and a solid shape. Nevertheless, at bottom this book is a lot of miscellaneous information chasing a subject. Even experienced students of the period will find plenty here that is new and interesting. in the 1860’s and was later to become the wife of an Amherst astronomer and the woman responsible for bringing Emily Dickinson’s poetry before the reading public, kept of her “erotic life.” 1 Professor Gay has an engaging manner and a sharp eye for a telling quotation and a choice example. He has come up with some real plums, too, notably what he calls the “exhaustive record” which Mabel Loomis Todd, a middle-class girl who grew up in Washington, D.C. Peering behind the formal 19th-century attitudes to sex, he has not only read the relevant secondary authorities, and ranged very widely in the published diaries and memoirs in English, French, and German, he has also tapped the rich sources of unpublished letters and diaries deposited in American libraries. Peter Gay is an ambitious and unusually wide-ranging historian of culture, and no one can fail to admire the industry with which he seeks knowledge and his zest in communicating it. We are promised that this is the first installment of “a project of enormous scope,” a “multivolume study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820’s to the outbreak of World War I.” Actually, it is an extensive but not particularly systematic survey of sexuality in the 19th century.
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.
0 kommentar(er)
