Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800-2000

Abstract

The first task he sets himself is to delineate the bourgeois-liberal context of nineteenth century smoking. He maintains this provided the ideological architecture through which most of the important subsequent debates about tobacco have been constructed. In an inspired choice, he utilises Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to illustrate this argument. Conan Doyle shared a Victorian belief that each man, at least those of the middle classes, smoked in his own individual way. This belief provided Doyle's great sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, with regular, crime-solving intelligence. Hilton also visits Victorian literary journals and magazines that featured regular articles on the history and practice of smoking. The selection and use of tobacco was represented, therein, in a form that facilitated a rationalisation of an act of masculine consumption. Tobacco was placed alongside a number of commodities, such as fine wine, tailored clothing, and mechanical gadgets, that could be appreciated only by tasteful and rational, bourgeois male consumers. This consumption was divorced from the supposedly passive or directed shopping habits of the female consumer. Extensive knowledge of these `masculine' products also served to de-feminise their consumption. Thus copious articles paid homage to the intellectual and skilful attributes associated with the male smoker.

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