In uncovering the roots of modernism, a master historian shows us a
hidden side of the Victorian era, the role of the bourgeois as
reactionaries, revolutionaries, and middle-of-the-roaders in the
passage of high culture toward modernism.
"In the Victorian decades, the name bourgeois was at once a term
of reproach and a source of self-respect". So Peter Gay opens his
newest and perhaps most surprising work. For the Victorians we meet
in this volume are not the stodgy, complacent characters of
drawing-room comedy. They are instead a varied crowd, from the
capitalists in the top tier of the bourgeoisie eager to be
recognized as gentlemen or, better yet, dubbed as nobility to those
at the bottom of the pile, the clerks and craftsmen mortally afraid
of sinking into the mass of the proletariat. What they share is an
anxiety, driven by their concern to advance up the social pyramid
or at least to maintain the status they have achieved.
Some of the individuals in this richly peopled narrative turn on
their own class, none more bitterly than Gustave Flaubert; others
celebrate their success, whether in Manchester or in Munich, by
sponsoring symphony orchestras or establishing museums; still
others become cultural hunters and gatherers, turning their newly
acquired fortunes to the private accumulation of art, ranging from
the "safe" works of the old masters to the daring innovations of
the Impressionists.
The stage is thus set for the explosion of modernism accompanied
by an inevitable reaction against the subversive avant-garde of
artists, composers, and writers as varied as Cezanne, Picasso,
Stravinsky, Shaw, Ibsen, and Zola. No one reading this concluding
volume of Peter Gay's magnificentrevaluation of the nineteenth
century will ever again use the term Victorian as a synonym for
dull.
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