This is actually Volume IV of Gay's series The Bourgeois Experience, an in-depth study of 19th-century European culture and its core themes and ideas. The blurb says that it "examines the intense middleclass preoccupation with the self" - a grandiose agendum, and rather an unfocused one. Naturally, there is a heavy reliance on fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, even the popular German writer Karl May who might be described as a cross between Kipling and Zane Grey. Though the book might so easily have become tendentious, it manages to be interesting throughout.