Schnitzler's Century

Peter Gay. Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.

This history of the Victorian bourgeoisie is framed by the life and writings (both published and private journals) of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. Gay acknowledges that Schnitzler was anything but a typical middle-class man in many ways. However, his peculiarities were those of his time, he grappled with and commented on the cultural and social anxieties of his age, and while he was certainly exceptional he was also very much a man of his time and class. He is a larger presence earlier in the book than in later chapters, but by that point he will have served his purpose as a guide.

Class, more than chronology, shapes this study. The Victorian bourgeoisie certainly varied across time and space (although centered in Europe, the United States is included in this study) but Gay is interested in common attributes and broader themes. The book is organized thematically, and works from the outside in--beginning with a look at the class as a whole in the wider world, and ending with an extended examination of the interior life, ending with a chapter devoted to the very Victorian notion of privacy and a private life.

Beyond this broad survey (made up of discrete thematic parts) this book does have a larger argument--historians and critics then and now have been far too harsh to the Victorian middle class. They were, in Gay's account, much less hypocritical, petty and middle-brow than their reputation. They were, he argues, much more responsible for the best of their era--the reform movements, artistic and cultural innovations, increase in democracy, and regard for the life of the mind--than they have been given credit. Sober and temperate, they may not have been romantic revolutionaries but neither were they smug, provincial vulgarians. Schnitzler had many faults as a young man (snobbishness and relentless womanizing) but in the end he put the best of himself in  his art and seemed to grow as a person as he aged and "settled down." His trajectory, and his life, were not a terrible analogy for the best of the middling class who were responsible for much of the best of the Victorian age.