BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE VOL.3, THE

The Victorians, like members of other cultures, gave themselves permission to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations they deemed to be inferior. But they also sought civilized rationales for their conduct,whether in the hunt for profits from new commercial ventures or for power in the political arena or for dominance over new movements that were bringing women out from domesticity.

But that is only part of the story. What makes Peter Gay's Victorian bourgeois so fascinating is that they debated everything--quite aggressively. While majorities clung to the death penalty or the right to mete out corporal punishment, an increasingly vocal minority attacked these time-honored forms of aggression and denounced them as pathological. While many found it convenient to manipulate evolutionary theories in order to justify aggressive conduct at home and abroad, Others including Darwin's most authoritative interpreter, Thomas H. Huxley, argued the other side of the coin. Everything from domestic arrangements to women's rights, higher education, the nature of humor, and the limits of violence in sports was open to discussion.

In pursuing the great Victorian debate over aggression, Peter Gay brings new light to familiar themes, and introduces themes that historians of the nineteenth century have so far evaded: the shifting relations of male to female writers, the uses of humor as a form of aggression, and constructive possibilities of aggression in the enterprise of winning the great battles against nature.