May be of interest.


>Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 11:41:32 +0000 (GMT)
>From: Anne Shepherd <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: REVIEWS IN HISTORY: O'Connell on Hilton - Smoking in Popular Culture
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Please note: The author is pleased to accept this review and will not be
>responding further.
>
>
>Reviews in History
>
>Smoking in British popular culture 1800-2000
>
>Matthew Hilton
>
>Manchester University Press, 2000
>Hardback ISBN 0 7190 5256 4 Paperback ISBN 0 7190 5257 2 284 pp, 22 illus.
>
>Reviewed by: Sean O'Connell
>University of Ulster
>
>Matthew Hilton has produced an extremely well written account of smoking
>in popular culture.  It is crafted skilfully in an attractive prose style
>that fully reflects the call of the editor of the Studies in Popular
>Culture series for readable and accessible academic writing. In his debut
>monograph Hilton has established himself as an historian of real ability
>and great promise.
>
>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.
>
>This section of Hilton's work can be usefully juxtaposed with a growing
>body of historical literature that is revising all-too-readily received
>assumptions about gender and consumption in late nineteenth and early
>twentieth century Britain, to produce a much more nuanced understanding of
>the processes involved.  There are, for example, important echoes of
>Christopher Breward's recent study on male fashion consumption in Hilton's
>discussion of the bourgeois fetishisation of male smoking rituals. (1)
>This relationship is most obvious in the section dealing with the
>nineteenth century and the form of bourgeois-liberal masculinity that
>surrounded tobacco use.  We learn that this culture worshipped the cigar
>and the pipe at the expense of the cigarette and that the latter was
>commonly associated with the feminine and the foreign.  The cigarette was,
>according to a number of magazine articles a `miserable apology for manly
>pleasure' that was suited to the `effeminate races of the Continent and
>the East'.  The cigarette smoker was a passive consumer, whilst the pipe
>or cigar aficionado was knowing and discriminating.
>
>Tracing the smoking rituals of working class men proved more elusive.
>They had neither the time nor the resources to fetishise their habit in
>literary journals. Hilton provides evidence of what appears to have been a
>more communal and regionally diverse culture - focused upon the workplace
>and the public house - than that practised by their bourgeois
>contemporaries. Initially these practices revolved around the pipes that
>were given away, in their thousands, by publicans to be filled with a
>variety of tobacco products that were selected frequently as the result of
>regional or occupational factors. Mass production in the late nineteenth
>century provided the impulse for a growing working-class cigarette buying
>public.  Conspicuous cigarette smoking in the company of the street corner
>boys who inhabited plebeian neighbourhoods commonly marked rites of
>passage from working class boyhood to wage-earning manhood.  Hilton
>concludes that the Victorian and Edwardian male working class smoker
>probably looked upon smoking - and what, where, when and how he smoked -
>as just as an important component in self-fashioning as did his bourgeois
>contemporary.  Thus we are returned to the recurring theme of the ideology
>of the liberal individual.
>
>The anti-tobacco movement, from Victorian crusaders through to
>contemporary British Medical Association campaigners, are also, Hilton
>concludes, best understood from the standpoint of the culture of
>independence and individuality.  The Victorian and Edwardian anti-tobacco
>movement, whose roots lay in non-conformist religion, struggled to
>establish its case.  A major Achilles' heel proving to be the over-egged
>list of ailments that it ascribed to smoking.  These included lip and
>throat cancer, deafness, blindness, alongside physical, mental and moral
>paralysis.  Its major success came about when its concerns chimed with the
>broader debate about racial and national degeneration, which became more
>prevalent following the panic about the poor state of many potential Boer
>War recruits.  `Smoker's heart' was said to be the medical problem lying
>behind up to a third of the military rejects from Lancashire.  This
>focused minds on the health of the nation's youth and anti-tobacco
>campaigners found their pleas for legislation on juvenile smoking more
>readily received.  Sir Benjamin Brodie, an eminent physician, argued that
>the racial decline of both the `Red Indians' and the `lazy and lethargic
>Turks' had been precipitated through smoking and that Britain's fate lay
>in the hands of the nation's youth.  Of course, what was really in their
>hands were the many cheap, mass produced cigarette brands that began
>appearing on the market in the late nineteenth century.  Hilton describes
>1883, when W.D. & H.O. Wills of Bristol began using the Bonsack machine to
>produce cigarettes, as the most crucial date in the history of tobacco.
>In making cigarettes cheaper it paved the way for a mass market. The
>sketchy evidence strongly suggests that there was a marked increase in the
>numbers of juvenile smokers in the 1880s and 1890s.  The resultant outcry
>eventually produced a legislative response in the form of the Children's
>Act of 1908.  The act prohibited the sale of tobacco products to youths
>less than sixteen years of age, although, as hundreds of thousands of
>`school bike- shed smokers' have discovered, it was to be one of the most
>transgressed laws of the twentieth century.  However, the anti-tobacco
>lobby did not seek to impose legislation on adult smokers. Sharing the
>bourgeois individualist ideologies of smoking's proponents, they sort to
>persuade individuals to give up tobacco rather to coerce them to do so.
>
>By the inter-war period anti-tobacco campaigning had waned because, Hilton
>argues, of `a cultural shift in which there was a different understanding
>of the relationship between the product, the market and the individual.'
>(76) In other words, a mass market arrived, represented by lower prices,
>greater consumption, together with more sophisticated and extensive
>advertising and marketing.  Hilton describes this lucidly and in the
>process again ensures that his history is not simply one about tobacco and
>smoking.  His work will inform our understanding of the impact of
>modernity on British society.  Moreover, in tracing the evolving
>nomenclature of tobacco brand names it charts the impact of British
>society on one modern consumer industry.  Thus brands drew regularly upon
>British heritage, military themes or other imagery that was calculated to
>appeal to `the mass'.  The lengthy discussion on advertising and marketing
>of cigarettes represents the best exposition of these practices yet to
>feature in a British historical case study.  From these foundations,
>Hilton produces a detailed narrative of the evolution of branding and
>market segmentation.  His argument is that cigarette manufacturers
>attempted to use the powerful new advertising medium to standardise
>consumption.  It is not explicitly acknowledged, but this was clearly a
>textbook attempt at a form of consumer engineering that mirrored the
>production engineering that made the mass market possible in the first
>place. (2) This section is also richly illustrated and the reader is given
>a rare opportunity to assess the academic commentary alongside the primary
>sources.  Later chapters on masculinity and femininity expand some of
>these themes, discussing the relationship between different brands, gender
>identities and the extent to which smokers and manufacturers constructed
>the relationship between these.  The importance of this link between
>marketing and consumer self-fashioning was highlighted by an exercise in
>blind product testing, carried out after the Second World War by Mass
>Observation, during which many smokers failed to recognised their
>favourite brand.
>
>The inter-war years also witnessed the democratisation of pipe use, it
>becoming associated with a middlebrow, common sense masculine identity.
>This was seized upon and knowingly deployed, at different times, by
>politicians such as Stanley Baldwin and Harold Wilson.  There is no
>mention, however, of a pipe user who was arguably even better known than
>these two illustrious figures. Eric Morecambe famously smoked a pipe to
>heterosexualise his bedroom scenes with Ernie Wise, in which the comic duo
>shared a bed for many of their TV sketches.  In the process, Morecambe
>brought new layers of meaning to the masculinity of the pipe.
>
>Unlike the pipe the cigar was not democratised during the twentieth
>century.  Its use was only sanctioned at times when display and
>flamboyancy were accepted - such as Christmas.  Only the socially exalted
>could get away with regular cigar smoking, others risked being perceived
>as uncultured and nouveau rich. Thus infamous cigar users include the
>illegal street bookmaker Sam Grundy from Walter Greenwood's novel Love on
>the Dole and Arthur Daley from the TV serial Minder.
>
>The history of the female smoker is one of changing conceptions of
>respectability and the role of commerce in this transformation.  The
>cigarette became important in the signification of new public expressions
>of womanhood: a process that gained in pace during the Edwardian and
>inter-war decades.  Hilton explains that this is only explainable in the
>context of changing employment patterns. Like working-class male smokers,
>less is known about female smoking practices than is the case for
>bourgeois pipe, cigar and cigarette aficionados.  It is only possible to
>speculate as to the extent of female smoking in the early-to
>mid-nineteenth century.  By the end of that century a critique of women as
>smokers was being paraded that will be familiar to historians who have
>worked on any number of aspects of `modern' women's behaviour, whether it
>be the use of sewing machines, cinema going, motoring or political
>involvement.  Rhetoric about female smokers highlighted its dangers for
>both individual women and for the nation's health as a whole.  Criticisms
>focused on factors such as the potential damage to female reproductive
>capacity and the biological and cultural `blurring' of the sexes.
>Rhetoric like this ensured that Victorian and Edwardian cigarette
>manufacturers were wary of directing advertising directly at the female
>consumer.  Hilton maintains that the impact of the two world wars and
>cinema ensured that this conservative marketing strategy was supplanted by
>increasing attempts to stimulate product differentiation and demand based
>upon gender.  There was, however, a great deal of androgynity about many
>popular brands such as Craven `A' or Weights.  As the twentieth century
>ticked on both genders were also experiencing increasing, if uneven, forms
>of leisure and disposable income.  These factors were important in making
>the cigarette a ubiquitous aspect of public life: by 1948 82 per cent of
>males and 41 per cent of females were smokers.
>
>The final section of the book deals with the health scares that haunted
>smokers and tobacco manufacturers alike in the second half of the
>twentieth century.  Hilton succinctly explains the technical and
>scientific arguments, which for so long allowed both groups to cast doubts
>on the smoking-cancer link.  He maintains that whilst manufacturers
>challenged the growing medical evidence about the link between cancer and
>tobacco, the `key to understanding the history of post-war smoking is the
>survival of the liberal notions of the smoking individual within a broad
>popular culture that contested the ability of the state to intervene in
>lifestyle decisions [7].  So despite what was becoming increasingly clear
>about the nature of addiction and the inability of smokers to quit, it was
>the masculine culture of tobacco, established by Victorian bourgeois
>smokers, that formed the backdrop to the reception of health scares
>surrounding smoking from the 1950s onwards.  A factor highlighted by other
>writers on the post-war tobacco industry is that of the economic
>importance and influence of the industry, but Hilton makes less of this in
>detailing successive governments' policies on advertising and health
>promotion.  (3) More space and, one senses, more faith is placed in what
>he calls the `more ideological' factor that formed the culture of the
>independent, liberal individual', as configured around the use of tobacco.
>To test this theory an analysis of several newspapers and their responses
>at significant moments during the smoking and health debate are analysed
>and this makes for enlightening reading.  Early reports on smoking and
>cancer were met by comprehensive coverage in the Guardian, fears about
>share prices in the Express (which was followed up by a persistent
>scepticism towards the medical establishment) and reports that the
>Russians were developing a cancer-free cigarette in the News of the World.
>All of which underlines the claim that public awareness of the scientific
>debate was at best uneven.  In such a climate it is easy to follow
>Hilton's argument about the continuing importance of the bourgeois liberal
>culture of smoking, in which everyone was prepared to take personal
>responsibility for their actions and all seemed to have a healthy,
>octogenarian, life-long smoker for a grandparent.  However, we are
>presented with interesting quotations on addiction, which have important
>and largely unacknowledged consequences for Hiltons's argument.  One
>medical journal, cited in the text, is compelling in this respect:
>
>The tendency to adjust one's beliefs so as to exonerate one's own
>behaviour is shown not only in the distribution of attitudes to the
>cigarette smoking-lung cancer hypothesis, but also in the common view that
>only heavy smoking is dangerous, with heavy smoking being defined as a
>level of consumption one step higher than one's own [227].
>
>Seen through the prism of quotations like this the medical and biological
>nature of addiction is difficult to reconcile with arguments about a
>liberal, individual `ideology' of tobacco use.  More discussion was
>required on this topic, which is the weak link in the monograph.  Perhaps
>this is because of the nature of the evidence deployed to chart smoker's
>experiences of tobacco.  It is acknowledged in one endnote that only a
>dedicated oral history project is likely to uncover fully the female
>material experiences of cigarettes.  Certainly there are many areas where
>it seems likely that an ethnographic approach might have produced
>rewarding narratives.  This study is immensely strong in its study of
>representations of smoking, but is less solid in analysing everyday
>cigarette use from the school bike sheds through to failed efforts to quit
>the habit and beyond, and, in too many cases, to the cancer ward.
>Ethnographic material is supplied through the amazingly fruitful archives
>of Mass Observation, but the ability of that organisation to let real
>people `speak for themselves' has been seriously questioned by scores of
>social historians.  Mass Observation did let people speak for themselves
>in formats that were too frequently de-contextualised. The final section
>on femininity raised a number of important issues which underline Hilton's
>acknowledgement of the need for an oral history in this area.  All too
>briefly the possible use of cigarettes by women to cope with a number of
>negative feelings is discussed. This is potentially of great importance
>when taken together with the changing gender dynamic of the smoking
>population: between 1948 and 1990 the proportion of adult males smoking
>fell from 82% to 38%, whilst the proportion of women only fell from 41% to
>31%.  There is an extremely important story still to be told here.
>
>This final point does not undermine what is clearly a fine piece of
>historical scholarship.  The range of sources employed here is significant
>from advertisements and trade periodicals, through to novels and medical
>literature.  Moreover they are used intelligently and their limitations
>are frequently acknowledged in what is a confident and healthily
>self-reflexive monograph.
>
>November 2001
>
>Notes:
>
>1. Christopher Breward, The hidden consumer: masculinities, fashion and
>city life 1860-
>1914 (Manchester University Press, 1999).
>
>2. For a discussion of consumer engineering see Kenon Brezeale, `In spite
>of women:
>Esquire magazine and the construction of the male consumer', Signs, 20
>(1994), 1-22.
>
>3. Peter Taylor, Smoke ring: the politics of tobacco (Bodley Head,
>1984).  Mervyn Read,
>The politics of tobacco: policy networks and the cigarette industry
>(Avebury, 1996).
>
>
>
>
>
>Anne Shepherd - Deputy Editor
>"Reviews in History"
>Institute of Historical Research
>Senate House
>Malet Street
>London WC1E 7HU
>
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>email: [log in to unmask]
>
>
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