Pleasure Wars

The final volume in the Yale historian's ambitious, ground-breaking study of middle-class life in Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century reveals the pleasures and anxieties of the Victorian upper and lower bourgeoisie. Reprint.

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.