Untitled

Leisure, Politics, and Consumption of Tobacco
house became an important means to define both the conviviality and exclusivity
of the male group. 25
But by far the most dominant and lasting culture of smoking was that found
in the pages of the periodical press which brought the “art” of the connoisseur
to a rapidly expanding pipe and cigar-smoking middle class. There is, of course,
a rich literary tradition celebrating smoking stretching, most notably, from
Robert Burton’s “divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco” to Lord Byron’s “Sublime
tobacco!”, and on through to Kipling’s “a woman is only a woman but a good cigar
is a smoke,” Charles Kingsley’s “lone man’s companion” and Oscar Wilde’s
flippant quip: “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite
and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” 26 But praise for tobacco
reached a peak in the latter half of the nineteenth century as numerous hack
journalists of the kind parodied in Gissing’s New Grub Street churned out countless
and highly derivative pieces which, importantly, enabled male consumers to escape
the passive and feminine associations of consumption and the market place.
Instead, their everyday, private, and self-indulgent purchasing acts were transformed
into an activity in accord with the perceived male role in life. Men were
taught how to appreciate a cigar, how to choose a pipe, how to develop their
personal tastes and settle on their own personal tobacco mixture, all to ensure that
they became the masters, not the victims, of commerce; not mere consumers, but
“ardent votaries,” worshippers, disciples, aficionados, and true friends of “the
divine lady nicotine.”
Specifically, the brief articles – or “whiffs” and “pipefuls” – taught male
smokers first to rationalize their habit and, second, to celebrate its more irrational
or ephemeral elements. To make consumption rational, smokers had to be
informed of the intellectual, the skilful and the purposeful aspects of tobacco. 27
Articles thus summarized the various areas of expertise surrounding smoking,
beginning with a general history stretching back to Columbus’s discovery in 1492,
outlining the plant’s anthropology and pharmacology, as well as creating a
compendium of easily digestible statistics. But in order to rid the act of consumption
of any of its feminine connotations, readers would be taken on a tour of
the more masculine sphere of production. Starting in the factories and wholesalers
of Britain, the smoker was transported to the Cuban tobacco fields of the Vuelta
Abajo and Veulta Arriba, before moving to the cigar Fabricas of Havana where
native “sylph-like” female cigar rollers could be seen touching and caressing every
part of the genuine article made for the lips of the Western male consumer. Once
informed of the facts of tobacco, smokers were then taught the skills, as hierarchies
of taste and appreciation were created for the aspiring connoisseur to climb. Here,
professionalism, mechanistic production, commercialism, and adulteration were
denounced by the ideals of amateurism and authenticity. Usually, only cigar and
pipe smokers were let into this all-male club, cigarette smokers being dismissed
323