Gay's search through middle-class Victorian culture, illuminated by lively portraits of such daunting figures as Bismarck, Darwin and his acolytes, George Eliot, and the great satirists Daumier and Wilhelm Busch, covers a vast terrain: the relations between men and women, wit, demagoguery, and much more. We discover the multiple ways in which the nineteenth century at once restrained aggressive behavior and licensed it. Aggression split the social universe into insiders and outsiders. "By gathering up communities of insiders," Professor Gay writes, the Victorians "discovered--only too often invented--a world of strangers beyond the pale, of individuals and classes, races and nations it was perfectly proper to debate, patronize, ridicule, bully, exploit, or exterminate." The aggressions so channeled or bottled could not be contained forever. Ultimately, they exploded in the First World War.

The author of the bestseller Freud presents a close examination of the aggression--and debate about aggression--that raged through the Victorian Age. Gay looks at the works of such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Nietzsche to present penetrating new insights.

With the same sweep, authority, and originality that marked his best-selling Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay here takes us on a remarkable journey through middle-class Victorian culture. Gay's search through middle-class Victorian culture, illuminated by lively portraits of such daunting figures as Bismarck, Darwin and his acolytes, George Eliot, and the great satirists Daumier and Wilhelm Busch, covers a vast terrain: the relations between men and women, wit, demagoguery, and much more. We discover the multiple ways in which the nineteenth century at once restrained aggressive behavior and licensed it. Aggression split the social universe into insiders and outsiders. "By gathering up communities of insiders," Professor Gay writes, the Victorians "discovered--only too often invented--a world of strangers beyond the pale, of individuals and classes, races and nations it was perfectly proper to debate, patronize, ridicule, bully, exploit, or exterminate." The aggressions so channeled or bottled could not be contained forever. Ultimately, they exploded in the First World War.

This book suggests that untying and recognising relations of intimacy and dependency can, under certain circumstances, change the discourse of hatred into relations of peace and even friendship.

A study of middle-class culture from the 1820s to World War I

Education of the Senses, the first book of Peter Gay's projected multi-volume study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of World War I, re-examines the sexual behavior and attitudes of Victorians

After a brush with a renegade deity, Lan Wangji invites Wei Wuxian back to the Lan Clan of Gusu. But Lan Wangji seems different from the young man Wei Wuxian used to know. This Lan Wangji keeps a secret stash of alcohol, puts up with all manner of shenanigans, and even lets Wei Wuxian lie on top of him for an entire night! What happened to the Lan Zhan who fought with Wei Wuxian over a jug of wine and berated him for slacking off? Travel back to when Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji were mere youths, to the pair's very first encounter!