‘Competitive Consumption’

To an Italian who traveled to England in the late sixteenth century — say, one of the artists commissioned to paint portraits of the Elizabethan elite — the island might not have appeared, as it had to the ancient Roman poet Virgil, ​“wholly separated from all the world,” but it would certainly have seemed strange. In London the visitor would have seen many signs of wealth and power: the sprawling royal residence of Whitehall; grand dwellings along the Thames for the leading aristocrats and their entourages; the magnificent abbey at Westminster housing the royal tombs; in the busy commercial center paved streets, some of them graced with beautiful fountains; a brooding fortress, imagined to have been built by Julius Caesar and used in the sixteenth century as a prison, a mint, an armory, and a royal menagerie. But there was much else that would have given pause.