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Matthew Hilton
this has led to calls for greater consumer protection, but, in specific cases such as
tobacco, the cultural identities formed through leisure have acted as important
bulwarks against state intervention. Indeed, as consumption has formed an ever
greater part of our leisure activities, our politics has consisted of a dual demand
for both greater state involvement in issues of safety and protection and greater
freedom for individual consumers to shape their leisure patterns in the manner of
their own choosing. In an age of heightened concern for the health of oneself and
those in one’s surrounding area, the cigarette smoker appears as villain; but in an
age also of expanding state authority in all spheres of life, the smoker remains, to
many, a hero of the liberal ideal of individualism.
Notes
1. E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present
38 (1967), pp. 59–91; D. Reid, “The Decline of St. Monday,” Past and Present 71 (1976),
pp. 76–101; R.D. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth Century England
(London: Croom Helm, 1982).
2. G. Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London: Routledge,
1993).
3. P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the
Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); G. Stedman
Jones, “Class Expression Versus Social Control? A Critique of Recent Trends in the Social
History of Leisure,” History Workshop Journal 4 (1977), pp. 460–508; H. Cunningham,
Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c.1780 – c.1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980); J.M.
Golby and A.W. Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England 1750–
1900 (London: Batsford, 1984); J. Walvin, Leisure and Society 1830–1950 (London:
Longman, 1978).
4. P.N. Lee, Statistics of Smoking in the United Kingdom, 7th edn (London: Tobacco
Research Council, 1976), pp. 21–3.
5. B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–
1872, 2nd edn (Keele: Keele University Press, 1994). The exception is with regard to
children: M. Hilton, “‘Tabs,’ ‘Tags’ and the ‘Boy Labour Problem’ in Late Victorian and
Edwardian England,” Journal of Social History 28 (1995), pp. 587–607. In the United
States, opposition was stronger, but still of much less impact when compared to the
campaigns against drink: C. Tate, Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of the “Little White Slaver”
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6. J. Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge,
1993); V.G. Kiernan, Tobacco: A History (London: Hutchinson, 1991); D. Harley, “The
Beginnings of the Tobacco Controversy: Puritanism, James I, and the Royal Physicians,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 67, 1 (1967), pp. 28–50; R.B. Walker, “Medical Aspects
of Tobacco Smoking and the Anti-tobacco Movement in Britain in the Nineteenth Century,”
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