Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

The pursuit of splendour in seventeenth-century England is the dominant theme of this handsomely produced and richly illustrated book. It traces changes in the English elite's taste for luxuries and curiosities of all kinds, from painting to plants, between 1600 and the 1680s, the ways in which they were influenced by cultural borrowings from abroad, and how they survived—and even gained extra stimulus from—government policies on the one hand and Interregnum disturbances on the other. It also seeks to integrate its subject into the wider history of consumption, which has tended, in England at least, to focus on a slightly later period. The overall impact of the book is not unlike that which must have been produced by a richly furnished early modern cabinet of curiosities of the kind Peck discusses. The reader emerges full of admiration for the unusual and enlightening information it contains, but also wondering whether the various elements hang together in quite the way the author intended. The great strength of Consuming Splendor is its success in illuminating and refashioning familiar topics with new material drawn from the author's commendably wide-ranging research. She uses the Cecil manuscripts relating to the New Exchange, ‘Britain's Burse’, to reconstruct the character of shopping in early Stuart London, for example, and records of government efforts to introduce a silk industry to explore the nature of early technology-transfer. Cranfield's building projects are among those deployed to demonstrate changing architectural fashions, and the activities of the Hamilton family and their agents to show new tastes in the collection of paintings. The Howards naturally feature at several points, Arundel himself as a collector, of course, but also his descendants, not least in relation to the early Royal Society (the importance of whose scientific and industrial activities Peck is keen to defend against more sceptical recent historians of the institution). The quality and range of contemporary collecting is also well exemplified in a discussion of Christopher Weld's ‘pursuit of the exquisite’ for his house in the West End and for Lulworth Castle, and in a splendid essay centred on Charles Cheyne's commissioning of an Italian tomb from Bernini's son in the 1670s, for his wife, a Cavendish, in Chelsea Old Church. It will be clear that we are a long way away from the territory which other historians of consumption have occupied when studying the later seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. We are not in the world of popular consumption, of tobacco, linen shirts and ready-made clothing, or even in that of the middle-class, whose demand for imported and domestically produced luxuries has been explored by Maxine Berg and others. Professor Peck nevertheless wishes to draw connections with that later period, and to argue that in all essentials the foundations for later consumer markets and appetites had been laid well before 1700. She argues that Jan de Vries's distinction between old and new luxuries (which might be thought relevant) is confusing and unhelpful, that the ‘demoralisation’ of luxury which has generally been dated to the time of Mandeville and his contemporaries was already well underway in the early seventeenth century, and that a large consuming public was in existence soon afterwards. The trouble with the argument is that it fails to take into account the demand side of the economy, as opposed to the supply side. Imports of new kinds of goods, projects for import substitutes and proposals for technology transfer were all well and good, but it needed shifts in per capita incomes and the distribution of wealth after 1650 to produce a consuming public which extended well beyond the elite, and hence the changes in expectations and attitudes towards luxury which came with it. Peck is absolutely right to argue that parts of the necessary infrastructure had been laid in her period, in the shops of London and the competitive social dynamics of its West End. They were essential. But the links between them and much broader changes in consumption need fuller elaboration than they are given here. Peck's concentration on a particular kind of consumption, fashionable, aristocratic, and metropolitan, is nonetheless rewarding. It tells us a good deal about changing public attitudes to trade, industry and innovation, but much more about shifts in elite taste and sensibilities with respect to such things as painting, public and private environments, antiquities and domestic comfort. It has something to offer all historians of the seventeenth century, whatever their own consumer preferences. It would be churlish to ask for more.