Smoking in British popular culture 1800–2000: perfect pleasures

Smoke from cigars, pipes and cigarettes has curled its way through all levels of society in the last two hundred years. Matthew Hilton peels away the multifaceted images evoked by smoking in British literature, advertising and the cinema, as well as by more recent medical and political responses. The virtues attributed to tobacco, pleasure and relaxation, were primarily for the leisured classes, embodied in the cover illustration of Frederick Burnaby, the Victorian adventurer, Household Cavalry officer, boxer, magazine founder and special correspondent. Conan Doyle, Byron, and J M Barrie were smokers who praised its effects, with equally devoted critics from the Anti-Tobacco Society, mixing medical evidence (nausea, dyspepsia, blindness, lip and throat cancer, hysteria, paralysis, insanity) with a twist of moral and religious dogma. Later the protection of childhood by universal education coincided with concerns about the evils of juvenile smoking. The poor condition of the nation's recruits to the Boer War led to welfare reforms including the prohibition of tobacco sales to those under sixteen by the 1908 Children's Act. Cigarettes were brought within the reach of the working classes with the introduction of a machine that could produce 300 cigarettes per minute in 1883, new technology that put the cigarette girls out of work, and the lowering of tobacco duty. By the end of the First World War, cigarette sales had overtaken those of pipe tobacco. Total tobacco use rose more than threefold over the period from two pounds for every adult over fifteen to seven pounds after the Second World War, while the population in Britain increased by more than four times between 1801 and 1951. The mass market required new images to accompany a wide variety of products. Advertising developed from cartoons with punchy captions to more sophisticated brand names, selling masculinity and feminity along with group identity. Increased advertising budgets (Imperial Tobacco Company spent £60 million in 1937) led to advertising inspectors and new dedicated retail outlets. Mass Observation described the place of smoking in daily lives as the cinema endorsed its glamorous image or defined its class affiliations. Within two years after the Second World War, the medical community began to look at the effects of smoking. Government funds were committed to investigate whether the incidence of lung cancer was related to smoking or to atmospheric pollution. The MRC-supported study by Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll, published in 1950, and the follow-up two …