Social History of Smoking

Before smoking was a health hazard, it was a statement. This vivid social history traces the cigarette's extraordinary journey through English life: from the Tudor courts where James I denounced it as a 'vile custom,' to the Georgian coffee houses where it symbolized intellectual rebellion, through the Victorian era when smoking became the province of rough working men and respectable women hid their habit in private, to the Edwardian age when the cigarette finally acquired its aura of cool sophistication. Apperson excavates the lost world where smoking was tied to class identity, gender politics, medical fads, and moral panics in equal measure. He shows how a leaf wrapped in paper became intertwined with Englishness itself, how the same act could mark a woman as a femme fatale or a gentleman as a cad, how public opinion swung wildly between viewing tobacco as medicine and viewing it as moral corruption. This is cultural history at its most addictive, revealing how a habit so ordinary became a mirror for every anxiety and aspiration in English society.