Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800-2000

Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800-2000. By Matthew Hilton. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000. xvii + 245 pp. Illustrations. Cloth, $74.95; paper, $29.95. ISBN: Cloth 0-719-05256-4; paper 0-719-05257-2.

Reviewed by Jordan Goodman

Smoking is fascinating. It is a cultural activity that probably one-third of the world's population shares. To a smoker, it's an immensely pleasurable activity loaded with meanings from past and present and practiced with minutely crafted, largely unconscious, detail on sublime objects. To an ex-smoker, it's a strange mixture of reminiscences of practices, things, and associations past and anxiety about their recurrence in the future. To a nonsmoker, it's a vile, wasteful, dangerous, intrusive, weird thing to do, orchestrated by secretive and manipulative multinationals. Interestingly, while most people have an opinion on smoking and while there are countless treatises, both academic and popular, on its whys and wherefores, there has hardly been any serious sustained effort to understand smoking as a cultural phenomenon over time. This is precisely what Matthew Hilton has set out to do, and the result is excellent.

Hilton has chosen to explore smoking in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a form of popular culture. The extended period he has chosen covers highly significant changes in what was smoked and by whom, and it is to Hilton's credit that these factors are not taken for granted but, instead, become the central objects of his analytical gaze. The nineteenth century opens with adult men enjoying their pipes and cigars and closes on the twentieth century, with youth and adults of both sexes caught up in smoking cigarettes. What happened here and what does it tell us about culture?

The core of the book is a sustained argument about the relation between smoking and self. This argument is built up through the book's three sections. The first, entitled "Culture," sets the scene of the nineteenth-century Victorian smoker, where the reader is first introduced to Hilton's insistence that a powerfully durable association between liberalism and smoking, between the individual, the object, and the practice, was first established. He shows, for example, how the pipe and cigar were molded into specific and individually distinct reflections and extensions of the bourgeois adult male. Backing, supporting, and fine-tuning the image was an array of magazines and periodicals, the most famous of which was Cope's Tobacco Plant, first launched in 1870. This and similar magazines helped to underline the cohesive nature of the male smoker's world, while celebrating their individuality, in a manner similar to specialized publications for professions such as doctors and lawyers. So powerful was the mutual reinforcement of liberalism and smoking that even the arguments of the various antitobacco movements that sprang up in Victorian Britain borrowed the ideological discourse of the target.

The second section, entitled "Economy" and concentrating on the period from the late-nineteenth century until the Second World War, begins with what most historians see as the key technological and business innovation of the tobacco industry of the last two centuries: namely, the mechanically produced cigarette and the multidivisional corporate enterprise. Pursuing his argument into this period, Hilton is less concerned with the innovations than he is with the cultural dialogue between the new object, the new producers and their new marketing tools (particularly advertising), and the actual and potential consumers. Hilton finds rich terrain to investigate masculinity, femininity, and juvenility as each was both fashioned by and fashioned the object of desire. Far from being a simple, homogeneous mass-- produced and marketed object of corporate capitalism, the cigarette, Hilton argues, was a nuanced commodity, which, in the fingers and mouths of its consumers, became transformed into a very personal effect and statement of individuality. Consumption, as seen through its practices, was manipulated not by advertisers but by individuals grounded in the ideology of nineteenth-century liberalism. The number of smokers grew enormously. By the end of the 1940s, around 80 percent of British men and 40 percent of British women smoked cigarettes regularly.

In "Science," the final section of the book, Hilton addresses the key tobacco issues of the postwar era, namely, the medicalization and politicization of smoking. He provides a succinct overview of the medical understanding of smoking, especially the link between cancer and tobacco. He also introduces many of the key players of the period, articulating the associations within which smoking became a political phenomenon. Never losing sight of his core argument, Hilton reiterates the association between liberalism and cigarette consumption, showing convincingly that popular understandings of, and reactions to, "scientific fact" were mediated by the same ideological props that first emerged with the pipe, the cigar, and the bourgeois Victorian man. Full circle. Hilton argues that smokers were aware of the dangers of their practices. Many stopped, and participation rates fell to an overall level of 30 percent. What maintained the levels was the cultural appropriation of the object, inasmuch as the image of smoking today as cool is beginning to drive levels upward.

Readers will have to make up their own minds whether Hilton's sustained argument works. He is careful to point out that his analysis may be specific to the British case, which, he concedes, has its own cultural peculiarities. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. Smoking is, and has been, such a widespread phenomenon that one can be excused for wondering whether there are other explanations that bind this shared experience. For the moment, though, Hilton has produced an excellent book, which, it can be hoped, will act as a model for future work on the smoking behavior of other societies.

[Author Affiliation]

Jordan Goodman is a reader in history at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He is the author (and coauthor) of a number of books and articles on science, technology, and health, including Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (1993) and The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-- Cancer Drug (2001). At present, he is writing a book about a British scientific voyage in the mid-nineteenth century.