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Peter Gay, Durfee Professor of History at Yale University, won the 1967 National Book Award for a two-volume study, The Enlightenment, and the R. W. Emerson Award for the authoritative monograph on Weimar Culture. His interest in psychoanalysis became manifest about a decade ago with a book of historiography, Art and Act. On Causes in History—Manet, Gropius, Mondrian, where he argued persuasively for the necessity of giving due weight to the psychological determinants of cultural events. He has been one of the most influential among historians who emphasize the singular importance of Sigmund Freud in shaping the civilization of our times, an estimate proclaimed through the very title of Gay's recent book, Freud, Jews and Other Germans. These intellectual commitments continue to pervade Gay's work, presently focused on the social history of the 19th century bourgeoisie in Western Europe and its American counterparts: Sigmund Freud is once again given star billing in the title of this enormous enterprise.
Education of the Senses is the first volume in a series that will examine the life of the Victorian middle class from a variety of viewpoints; when it was published, the exact organization of the work as a whole had not as yet been decided. It is apparent, however, that we are being presented with a major effort in the new genre of history inaugurated in France some decades ago by the group associated with the journal Annales, the best known among whom is probably Fernand Braudel. The latter entitled one of his capital books The Structures of Everyday Life—a designation that could serve admirably to characterize the program of Gay's current work. Braudel focused on the origins of the modern era and scarcely touched the period we call Victorian; Theodore Zeldin's five-volume study, France 1848-1945, approximates