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   On a visit to America, Victorian novelist Charles Dickens recorded in his notebooks the following critique of American tobacco habits:
“As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening.  In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognized” (quoted in Gately, 174).

The advertisement above, featured in the January 1st, 1807 issue of Harper’s Weekly, portrays the proud façade of the Pioneer Tobacco Factory, located in Brooklyn, New York and producing, by the millions of pounds, the chewing tobacco which Dickens so detests.  The closing statements of the advertisement proudly declare: “The business is founded on a basis systematized and conducted in a manner which places the Company in a position precluding any differences with the government.”

From the early days of its introduction to Europe, the practice of consuming the cured leaves of the plant Nicotiana tabacum has been the center of heated (no pun intended) controversy.  These debates, both personal, like Dickens’ critique, and national, such as government bans and taxes, continue to this day.  However, in England, at the height of the Victorian Period, tobacco enjoyed almost universal popularity, as seen in this statement of Mr. Raffles, a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “But come, now—as between man and man—without humbug—a little capital might enable me to make a first-rate thing of the shop.  The tobacco trade is growing” (Eliot, 388).  Tobacco being often a thing between man and man, the arguments of the time revolved not around tobacco itself, but around the particularities of its uses.

 In F. W. Fairholt’s book, Tobacco, its History and Associations, including an Account of the Plant and its Manufacture, with its Modes of Use in all Ages and Countries, published in London in 1859, examples can be found of the distinctions made between class and gender as they pertain to the mode in which tobacco is taken by the members of these separate social hierarchies. 

    To the left is an excerpt of Fairholt’s book which indicates a common generalization that tobacco was decidedly gendered: Sir Walter Raleigh's smoking habits existed "in spite of" his courtiership to the Queen.  Only by a common assumption of the Queen's distaste for tobacco could his pipe smoking be termed ostentatious in this regard.  Though women did smoke tobacco (as well as use snuff, often taken as a cure for headaches)—as seen in this passage of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights: “Under the porch, a girl of nine or ten sat knitting, and an old woman reclined on the horse-steps, smoking a meditative pipe” (Brontë, 285)—the habit of smoking was usually relegated to the lower classes, as seen in another passage of the novel in which the young Catherine Linton dissuades Hareton (a gentleman of untrained manners) from smoking by taking his pipe: “Before he could attempt to recover it, [the pipe] was broken, and behind the fire” (292).

   From this page (at left) of Fairholt’s book may be found another hint at the gender distinctions of tobacco consumption.  The image on the page is the author’s replication of the crest of London’s incorporation of tobacco-pipe makers, founded during the rule of King James.  The passage reiterates the very masculine motto of the company: “Let brotherly love continue.”  The motto indicates both an exclusion of the opposite sex as well as the social bond formed over a bowl of leaf.

If male members of the upper class did choose to smoke tobacco, they did so in a manner distinct from the classes beneath them in society, after a fashion largely based on the style of pipe they employed.  Though the notion of a pipe conjures an image of a wooden apparatus in the modern mind, in Victorian England tobacco pipes were most commonly made of clay, which explains the ease with which Catherine shatters Hareton’s unbecoming comfort.  The image below shows the size and shape of the clays used by upper class smokers, as well as the smoker’s plug of tobacco, from which portions must be cut with a knife.

   This type of pipe would be common to wealthy tabagophiles such as Sir Walter Raleigh.  The labor class in England, on the other hand, enjoyed their smoke in quite a different vessel. 

   This page below of Fairholt’s work gives a description of this type of pipe, as well as a couplet indicating the association of short pipes with poor people, or members of the working and soldiering classes.  Again, this detail is also seen in the literature.  Joseph, a servant in Wuthering Heights, is seen “…stuffing a three-inch pipe with tobacco” (Brontë, 59).                                                                  

Though the focus of debate has changed since the Victorian Period, the controversy itself still clings to tobacco like the smell of its consumption, remaining an interesting social indicator and a unique piece of culture on both sides of the Atlantic. 

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Notes on the Text 

Nicotiana tabacum: One of sixty-four plants in the genus Nicotiana and the one presently consumed by humans, comprised of a single stock bearing a multitude of alternately growing long, broad leaves, and producing a collection of small, star-shaped flowers. 
 
plug: a portion of cured tobacco, pressed in a block or rolled for fermentation and storage.
 
snuff: powdered tobacco leaves, pinched between the fingers and inhaled through the nose. 
 
tabagophiles: lovers or devotees of smoking tobacco. 

Works Cited 

Brontë, Emily.  Wuthering Heights.  Ed. Beth Newman.  Broadview Press, 2007. 

Eliot, Geoge.  Middlemarch.  Ed. David Carroll.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 

Fairholt, F. W.  Tobacco; its history and associations; including an account of the plant and its manufacture; with its modes of use in all ages and countries.  London: Chapman and Hall, 1859.  <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ncs1.ark:/13960/t35148n0v>.

Gately, Iain.  Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization.  New York: Grove Press, 2001.

"The Pioneer Tobacco Factory."  Harper's Weekly 7 Jan. 1871: 14. 

Kyle M. Janke

Eastern Michigan University

2011

LITR 565