Class

In one sense, smoking is a habit that overrides all distinctions of class. Since the seventeenth century it has been an item of mass consumption across Europe and America and in the twenty-first century cigarettes are smoked across all sections of society all over the world. However, significant class differences have always existed in tobacco consumption patterns. In the eighteenth century, snuff was associated with Europe's aristocratic elites, resulting in such fascinating historical quirks as the pockets of Frederick the Great of Prussia, specially enlarged to accommodate his prolific consumption. In southern Europe, the great state-owned tobacco factories of Cadiz and Seville ensured the popular appeal of the cigar, though one result of the Peninsular Wars (1808–1814) was to lead to its spread among the officer classes of England.

Although the virtues of smoking have been praised in prose and verse ever since its introduction into Europe, the late nineteenth century witnessed a particularly bourgeois celebration of the pipe and the cigar, promoting a culture based on liberal individualism. The periodical press brought the "art" of the connoisseur to a rapidly expanding pipe and cigar-smoking middle class. Numerous hack journalists of the kind parodied in English novelist George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) churned out countless and highly derivative pieces which, importantly, enabled male consumers to escape the passive and feminine associations of consumption and the marketplace. 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."

Historians and scholars know less about working-class smoking attitudes and practices. Undoubtedly, distinctions existed across states, regions, towns, and occupations. Visitors to Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries frequently commented on the sight of entire communities smoking, their habits following those of their northern European counterparts as the majority used pipes, the great exception being the popularity of chewing tobacco. This required no special preparation since users merely bit off the hard manufactured tobaccos of twist and plug that were sold both for pipes and for grating into snuff. But the differences are too many to recount. In nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, Welsh miners were known to prefer strong shag tobaccos (coarsely cut leaf) and rolls (tied tightly into a type of rope), dock laborers were associated with thick twists, cabmen for Irish roll, while the better paid and London workers preferred the lighter and more finely cut Virginian flake tobaccos that were ready to smoke.

These differences were to some extent overshadowed by the rise of the cheap cigarette, an item much more of mass—as opposed to class—consumption. Popularized in wartime and on the cinema screen, and promoted by enormous tobacco combines and monopolies, some of the first global brands emerged in the cigarette market. Class differences have persisted, especially with regard to the prices of types of cigarettes, and advertisers have sought to appeal to people's sense of individuality; however, by the mid-twentieth century smoking was almost a classless pleasure.

However, since the smoking and health controversy of the 1950s, public health campaigns have had much greater impact upon affluent, professional males, making smoking today a health problem increasingly associated with poverty. The issue is also overlaid with questions of gender and ethnicity, as smoking rates among women have not decreased to the same extent and tobacco companies have been further criticized for targeting poor ethnic minorities in the United States. Outside the affluent West, tobacco companies have also entered new less-regulated markets in Africa and the East, raising the potential for new distinctions of class as educated elites show far greater awareness of the dangers of smoking.

? MATTHEW HILTON

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hilton, Matthew. Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800–2000. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Kiernan, V. G. Tobacco: A History. London: Hutchinson, 1991.

Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. London: Picador, 1995.

Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes. New York: Vintage, 1997.

snuff a form of powdered tobacco, usually flavored, either sniffed into the nose or "dipped," packed between cheek and gum. Snuff was popular in the eighteenth century but had faded to obscurity by the twentieth century.

individualism an independence of spirit; the belief that self-interest is (or should be) the goal of all human actions.

plug a small, compressed cake of flavored tobacco usually cut into pieces for chewing.