The naked heart

For decades after the romantic poets, novelists, artists, and philosophers who had celebrated the liberated spirit passed from the scene, their ideas and ideals, suitably tamed for middle-class consumption, continued to percolate through Victorian culture. At the very time that industrial and mercantile buccaneers, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists conquered new worlds through their mastery of objective facts, much of the bourgeoisie looked inward. In The Naked Heart, Gay crosses seemingly impenetrable divides. He moves across gulfs separating business magnates from petty clerks, professional men from small merchants, academics from those without university education; he touches the lives of housewives and of women who acted boldly, beyond domesticity, by entering harshly competitive fields as professional authors and by making themselves into indefatigable gadflies of a male-dominated world. He follows the middle classes' preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions: self-portraits and autobiographies, fiction both elevated and popular, and works of history - all more widespread in the nineteenth century than ever before - and through the intimate confessions so characteristic of middle-class men and women. The Naked Heart does not confine itself to the famous; it explores how the makers of international bestsellers approached - or evaded - the inner lives of their characters in works now little remembered. And in its broad sweep, it counterpoises a painter like Caspar David Friedrich, forgotten for decades, who wanted his landscapes to convey a profound religious experience, with Jean Francois Millet whose Angelus would become a household favorite, endlessly reproduced, with the original fought over by collectors until the Louvre finally bought it for more than 800,000 francs. In investigating the inner life of the whole Victorian bourgeoisie, that vast class, in Emile Zola's words, "reaching from the common people to the aristocracy," Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Mental Health. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.