Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

The general consensus among social historians has been that the eighteenth century—or at least the "long eighteenth century" from c.1660 to c.1820—saw middle-class consumers creating a new kind of luxury consumption through new wants, new goods, new ways to sell them, and new social amenities. This view also reinforced the theory of the development across the same period of a new, essentially bourgeois, "public sphere" of reading, discussion and participation. Linda Levy Peck proposes instead a different chronology with a significantly different emphasis, outlining the rise of luxury consumption between c.1600 to the 1670s. Consuming Splendor tells of new ways to shop, above all in London; of royal patronage, notably by James I, of luxury trades such as the import of porcelain and of manufactures such as silk and tapestries; and of new aspirations shaped by print, often imported, and travel to the European continent, which often resulted in new expenditures on buying, building, furnishing and collecting paintings and sculpture. Gardens and the collecting of rare plants became widely fashionable among aristocrats, gentlemen and merchants. She shows how objects such as funeral sculpture moved across cultures and countries, from Rome to Chelsea, and how early science, particularly after the foundation of the Royal Society, both enabled and underpinned new forms of luxury consumption. More scientific knowledge of botany was built on the foundations already established by devoted gardeners and plantsmen. For historians of the seventeenth century, probably her most challenging chapter contains a new reading of the tumultuous decades of the Civil War and Interregnum, where she emphasises continuities, rather than wholesale disruption. After the worst war years of 1642-47 were over, London rapidly revived, and there was a considerable market for fine art, reproductions and prints. The transformation of the built environment, which had proceeded apace before 1640, continued in the capital and some great country houses including Wilton, Coleshill and Ashridge were built, rebuilt or extended by Parliamentary peers such as Northumberland, Pembroke and Bridgewater. The positive consequences of royalist exile emerged after the Restoration, when new farming technologies and techniques such as rotation, with new crops, which had been observed in the Netherlands in the 1650s, were applied to English estates and farms. Across the whole period Peck argues for a steady "de-moralisation" of luxury, despite various fears that it was either immoral, or effeminate, or suspiciously popish. Moreover luxury percolated downwards, with prices dropping, not least because by the 1660s imports had doubled and the colonial trades had emerged among the greatest drivers of British economic growth.

There are some additional points where received opinions are tested and found wanting. Art historians have argued that there was no art market as such before the 1680s, and that earlier evidence merely showed great patrons acting in a vacuum. Never particularly persuasive, that assumption is overthrown by plentiful evidence of the import, creation and dissemination of paintings and sculpture by numerous patrons, not just the well-known ones such as Buckingham and Arundel. Lionel Cranfield bought pictures that had belonged to Adam Newton, tutor to the ill-fated Henry Prince of Wales. Ambassadors acted as agents for courtiers wishing to acquire French and Italian paintings, textiles and antiquities; Charles I allowed copies to be made of his paintings and not all of them were sold abroad. Colonel Hutchinson, that paragon of republican virtue (according at least to his wife) purchased some of them. Peck also produces evidence that shows how greater opportunities for shopping particularly benefited women, who enjoyed it as an additional recreation; public spaces such as the Earl of Salisbury's New Exchange, in the Strand, long preceded the coffee-houses as places where women could go unchaperoned, and even where they could earn an independent living as shopkeepers.

Beautifully illustrated and full of fascinating detail, Consuming Splendor makes important claims that should give rise to wide debate. It could be counter-argued that the book is largely about...