Content warning: the following article cites derogatory language about indigenous peoples as well as references to substance use disorder, domestic abuse, and suicide.

Banning Tobacco: Public Health Measure or Obstruction of Liberty?

In 2019, the UK government published a green paper on preventative health that announced an ambitious plan: England could become ‘smoke-free’ by 2030.[1] The report lists smoking, alongside obesity and physical inactivity, as a risk factor for early death. ill-health and disability, and counts an astonishing 80,000 preventable deaths per year due to smoking-related illnesses. It was not surprising, then, for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to announce a proposal in late August 2024 that would ban outdoor smoking in pub gardens and other outdoor venues.[2] Furthermore, by reviving former PM Rishi Sunak’s flagship plan to continually raise the legal age for purchasing tobacco and so create a ‘smoke-free generation’, the current administration has once again stoked a divisive debate between those who view such ‘endgame’ bans as preventative measures for public health and those who view them as violations of individual freedom.^[3]

The discourse around endgame proposals intended to create tobacco-free societies has a long history in the UK. In 1604, King James I published, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, to express his staunch opposition to the “vile custom of taking Tobacco.”[4] In the pamphlet, the sovereign considered the plant a threat to his own authority as king, to the health of his subjects, and to the maintenance of a national English identity.^[5] In turn, he relied on a racist and elitist language that condemned how his childish subjects sought to “to imitate the barbarous and beastly maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians” from the Americas.[6] Despite his rhetorical efforts, smoking and snuffing tobacco became ingrained into the social practices of intoxication in England from the seventeenth century onwards. The Cavalier ethos, a literary identity inspired, in part, by the drug-laden writings of Ben Jonson, openly celebrated the carpe diem lifestyle of sexual encounters, hedonistic feasting, drinking toasts to king and country, and, naturally, smoking tobacco until dizzy in the head. During the English Civil Wars, Parliamentarians disparaged the Cavaliers and Royalists by associating their cause with drunken licentiousness and overindulgence in smoke and drink.^[7] Nonetheless, the social practice of smoking, and its surrounding discourse, soon became integrated in England’s foremost elite institutions: the Inns of Court, the Palace of Whitehall, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Like today, the act of smoking tobacco in early modern England was not only the consumption of a psychoactive substance, but likewise enveloped questions and assertions of identity, socioeconomic status, nationalism, and political allegiances.

University Wits and Dons: A Clash of Smoke

With tobacco-snuff and smoking increasing in popularity, so too did the backlash against this custom proliferate in the printed discourses of university settings during the nineteenth century. One memoir associated the clannish attitude of Fellows at New College, Oxford, “who (not liking the then newly-introduced luxury of Turkey carpets) often adjourned to smoke their pipes in a little room opposite to the Senior Common Room,” with a metaphorical smog of insularity and academic torpor, complaining of the college leadership’s failure to “sweep away the cloud which was yearly growing darker and thicker by comparison with the atmosphere without.”[8]  At other times, disapproval of smoking was instead aimed at aspiring and defiant undergraduates, such as Alfred Tennyson who, according to Compton Mackenzie, “smoked hard as an undergraduate” as a member of the Cambridge Apostles.^[9] One can imagine these young men filling the air between words with smoke as they engaged in their weekly intellectual discussions, perhaps debating the harms and benefits of their precious herb.

Another nineteenth century Cambridge undergraduate, Charles Stuart Calverley, who migrated from Oxford after a “college escapade,” embodied the university school of wits through his Latin and English poems that celebrated the pleasures of the intellect and of intoxication. Described as “a universal favourite, a delightful companion, a brilliant scholar and the playful enemy of all ‘dons’,” Calverley quickly established a reputation for his humorous yet elegant verse on subject matters ranging from classical translations of Homer to lyric exercises on the virtues of beer.[10] Calverley remains one of the only undergraduates to win the Chancellor’s prize for Latin verse at both Oxford and Cambridge. Years after graduating and passing the bar, Calverley suffered a debilitating injury from a skating accident and lived much of his short life in ill-health, eventually passing away in 1884 at the age of 53 from Bright’s disease. Despite his prolific writing career, which produced Translations into English and Latin in 1866, Theocritus translated into English Verse in 1869; Fly Leaves in 1872; and, posthumously, Literary Remains in 1885, Calverley’s literary legacy is most known to Cambridge residents and visitors for his tribute to one of the intoxicants he prized most in his short life: tobacco.

Calverley’s “Ode to Tobacco”

Calverley left an enduring cultural artifact of these disputes on the corner of Market Hill and Rose Crescent, Cambridge. A bronze plaque displayed on the wall of the now-closed Bacon’s Tobacconist (now a French Connection boutique) displays his “Ode to Tobacco,” written in 1862.

The poem’s brief epigraph reads a “Tribute to this Firm,” as if the brick-and-mortar shop were once a patron of the literary arts. Indeed, the first stanza expresses unequivocally the pro-tobacco position:

The speaker addresses an unnamed “Thou,” perhaps the tobacconist or a personified version of Tobacco itself, who can bid their fears and “Black / Care” away while on their journey. What can accomplish this anxiolytic effect “when the morn is grey,” or after lunch, or “at the close of day”? Sweet tobacco, of course! However, the speaker knows his habit has its detractors. His “liking old / For thee” is questioned by the “manifold / Stories” told of tobacco’s health risks, which are “not to thy credit” (lines 9-12). Such stories include:

This reference likely alludes to the toxic properties of pure nicotine tested cruelly on animals starting in the late 1800s. Despite its lighthearted tone, the line “Drops make a cat a ghost” is quite accurate, considering that the LD50 (the lethal dosage for 50% of experimental subjects) for small animals can range from 0.5-1.0mg / kg of bodyweight.^[13] A comprehensive list of potential risks continues. They “who use fusees,” a colloquial play-on-word with fuses and “the kinds of matches with combustible heads,” may “grow by small degrees / Brainless as chimpanzees / Meagre as lizards”(lines 17-20).^[14] While Calverley’s wry humour mocks those in the medical community with outlandish comparisons to animal sentience, the joke relies on a contemporary belief (still held by us moderns) that animals are less than humans and thus solely used for testing and consumption. Continuing, Calverley extends his jeering to human smokers, who may start to

Psychosis, domestic abuse, and suicide are all fair play in Calverley’s satirical rendering of anti-smoking opinion.

In the following stanza, the speaker admonishes these warnings as “knavish tricks” and provides anecdotal evidence in favour of his continued habit (line 25). Lines such as, “Yet know I five or six / Smokers who freely mix / Still with their neighbours” may remind modern readers of a recent statement by Michael Kill, CEO of the Night Time Industries Association (lines 26-28). Of the 6.4 million people who smoke in the UK in 2024, says Mr. Kill, many “enjoy doing so in social settings like beer gardens.”^[15] Calverley and Kill would appear to agree that social connection, which may prevent adverse health outcomes in some high-risk populations, ought to be considered in the proposed banning of smoking in public places.^[16] Likewise, Calverley’s ode exposes the ways that class division can be mobilised in debates on smoking and public health. Referring to a common, everyman “Jones, who, I’m glad to say, / Asked leave of Mrs. J.,” the speaker suggests that the working-class male, lacking titles and or wealth, “Daily absorbs a clay / After his labours” without harm and without the company of women, like Mrs. J (lines 29-32). In the final stanza, the speaker acknowledges that “Cats may have had their goose / Cooked in tobacco juice,” but that should not deny the smoker a puff of tobacco when “Thoughtfully taken” (lines 33-34, 36). The poem ends with a call to arms of various smoking paraphernalia, “Smith, take a fresh cigar! / Jones, the tobacco jar!,” and a toast to the patron who supplies the intoxicant: “Here’s to thee, Bacon!” (lines 38-40).

In Calverley’s “Ode to Tobacco,” readers can see how the seemingly innocuous celebration of the drug can marshal pro- and anti-tobacco rhetoric for its poetic purposes. The poem’s speaker seems to inhabit a public sphere of male smokers who connect across class divisions while shunning orthodox medical advice. The fact that this plaque adorned Bacon’s Tobacco shop also reveals the ways that words and imagery can be deployed for the often-deceptive efforts to market tobacco as a healthy and enjoyable pastime, a topic that could justify its very own article. Indeed, Calverley makes no explicit mention of the addictiveness of tobacco. We can likewise speculate whether he knew about how smoking exacerbated symptoms for chronic smokers and drinkers with Bright’s disease. What compelled him to continue the consumption of a substance that likely only worsened his symptoms? Even today, despite our knowledge of genetic predisposition, environmental factors, and brain chemistry, the understanding of substance use disorder requires both medical and behavioural models for treating the condition. Individualised interventions that focus on recovery-oriented values and that recognise sociocultural backgrounds can also implement disease treatments without stigmatising drug users as threats to public health and society.[17] Calverley’s “Ode to Tobacco” remains a unique, material artifact that captures the subjective, often paradoxical, experience of the tobacco smoker who delights in their intoxication, while also recognising its inevitable harms. Such artwork can perhaps illuminate the complexity our own modern discourse, where the assurance of public well-being necessarily confronts the maintenance of civil liberty. Admittedly, reading Calverley fails to clear up any of the smoke and mirrors that remain in our charged political discourse about smoking. What his poem may provide, however, is a space, both on the page and on the wall of 16 Market Hill, where such discussions can take place.

Written by Richard Parnell

Not all Cambridge students treated Bacon’s tobacconist with such reverence, and in 1897 its windows were smashed during riotous celebrations of the university’s refusal to grant degrees to female students; you can read more about the violent campaign to exclude women here. You can also find out about another nineteenth-century clash between the demands of public health and personal freedom in our article on the ‘Anti-vaccers’ of Oxfordshire. Meanwhile, to explore wider questions about Cambridge’s memorials – whose stories do they commemorate, and when should we challenge those narratives? – join us on our regular Uncomfortable Cambridge tours.

References

[1] Department of Health & Social Care, “Advancing our health: prevention in the 2020s: Presented to Parliament by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Public Health and Primary Care,” Gov.UK (July 2019).

[2] Josephine Franks, “How would an outdoor smoking ban work – and who would be part of the ‘smoke-free generation’?” Sky News (29 August 2024).

^[3] Andreas T. Schmidt, “Freedom of choice and the tobacco endgame,” in Bioethics 36:1 (2022), pp. 77-84, accessed September 15, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9298279/.

[4] James I., A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London: 1604) from Early English Books Online, accessed 20 September 2024. 

^[5] Susan Campbell Anderson, “A Matter of Authority: James I and the Tobacco War,” in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 29:1 (1998), pp. 136-37.

[6] James I., A Counterblaste to Tobacco.

^[7] Dayne C. Riley, Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire 1660-1751 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2024), pp. 16-17.

[8] G.V. Cox, Recollections of Oxford (London: Macmillan and Co., 1870), p. 186-7.

^[9] Compton Mackenzie, Sublime Tobacco (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 176, 199.

[10] Arthur Waugh, “Calverley, Charles Stuart,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, vol 5. (11^th ed.) Cambridge UP, 1911, p. 70. See also “Beer” in Charles Stuart Calverley, Verses and Translations (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), pp. 52-60, from Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4096/pg4096-images.html#page60. Line numbers cited in the text.

[11] Image attributed to Vysotsky (Wikimedia)licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calverley%27s_Ode_to_Tobacco.jpg.

[12] Ibid, “Ode to Tobacco,” pp. 60-63.

^[13] Masato Okamoto, et. al., “Effects of aging on acute toxicity of nicotine in rats” in Pharmacology & Toxicology 75:1 (July 1994), pp. 1–6, accessed September 15, 2024. https://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/nicotine.htm#PartTitle:7.%20TOXICOLOGY.

^[14] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fusee, n.,” def. 2.5,” June 2024.

^[15] Alix Cubertson, “Smoking ban in pub gardens and outdoor venues being considered due to ‘huge burden’ on NHS, Starmer says,” Sky News (29 August 2024).

^[16] H.M.E. Foster, et. al., “Social connection and mortality in UK Biobank: a prospective cohort analysis,” BMC Med 21, no. 384 (2023), accessed September 18, 2024. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-023-03055-7

[17]Trude Klevan, et al. “Toward an Experience-Based Model of Recovery and Recovery-Oriented Practice in Mental Health and Substance Use Care: An Integration of the Findings from a Set of Meta-Syntheses.” International journal of environmental research and public health 20: 6607 (August 2023).