By focusing on the lives, attitudes, discontents, institutions, tastes, goals and passions of the West's middle classes, Gay has redefined the reader's thinking about the 19th century as a whole, and about the social grouping that was its dynamo, the middle class, in particular. He reveals the making and workings of the bourgeois mind: the world's Victorians stand analyzed and unmasked. Gay draws on the thoughts, words and deeds of physicians, merchants, teachers, housewives, novelists, painters, artisans and politicians, using diaries, letters, household manuals, medical texts, lectures, religious tracts and works of art to produce a collective portrait of the century that made the modern world, that made us what we are - here depicted in all its rich, chaotic complexity.