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Matthew Hilton
enormous moral and political unease throughout Europe in the early modern
period, but by the late nineteenth century, the only sustained opposition to adult
smoking came from a radical wing of the temperance movement which at its peak
in 1857 could raise no more than a few hundred pounds a year to fund its propaganda
efforts. 6 If tobacco’s content raised comparatively few objections, the time
taken to enjoy it as a leisure pursuit raised even less; a pipe was often smoked
through work or leisure and a cigarette took only a few minutes to consume.
Yet the importance of smoking as a leisure activity has not been lost on scholars
outside of history. Contemporary social investigators and more recent feminist
analyses of leisure have frequently referred to the “chameleon-like” quality of
leisure, a cup of tea or a cigarette offering many women an important, if not the
only, break from the routine of work in the home and outside. 7 Such detailed
studies of leisure seem to raise a further set of questions relating not to the control,
but to the experience of leisure. Indeed, we might turn around the original concerns
of the historians of leisure and explore not only how leisure is controlled from
without, but also how the internal forms of knowledge and role-playing produced
through participation in a particular leisure activity are then taken on as wider
cultural and even political identities. This is to ask how identity politics formed
during time spent in leisure can affect the development of the marketplace and
even the incremental expansion of the entire modern state apparatus. Here,
histories of leisure can be intertwined with histories of consumption which
demonstrate how detailed case studies of the use of specific goods can result in
the formation of wider collective ideologies, attitudes, and social movements. 8
Tobacco is ideally situated for such a case study, it being the one leisure
commodity that came under the greatest contemporary scrutiny, whether through
advertising, books celebrating its use, or through medical literature. The study of
its history enables an analysis to be made of what it meant and signified to different
sections of the community. In what follows I will trace the history of smoking
among women and working-class men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, before outlining a particular culture or cult of smoking espoused by an
expanding middle class in the cheap periodical press of Chambers’ Journal,
Macmillan’s Magazine, All the Year Round, and Once a Week, as well as in numerous
books and “odes” devoted to tobacco or “the divine weed.” In these works, a
gender specific “philosophy” of smoking emerged that emphasized the liberal
values of independence and individuality. This masculine, largely bourgeois,
understanding of smoking subsequently came to have much greater cultural
resonance and, I will argue, was an important means by which smokers reacted to
the revelations linking smoking to lung cancer in the 1950s and 1960s and also
how governments have intervened in this individual act of consumption. 9
For a leisure activity seemingly so ubiquitous, it is not surprising that smoking
has meant many things to many people. The overwhelming Victorian attitude to
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