Tobacco’s Publics

Abstract

In the coffee house the smell of tobacco created an intimate public, bound together by the common consumption of smoke, that excluded the nerves of women and sensitive fops who were said to abhor tobacco smoking’s scent. Yet the growth of new, mixed-sex, sociable spaces encouraged attacks on tobacco consumption as unmannered and unmanly. In its place rose snuff—a way of managing the idiosyncratic nerves without invading others’ atmospheres. Snuff had problems—it was dirty and noisy. But it worked well in a society in which increasing emphasis was based on managing the olfactory boundaries of the body and its circumambient space. The coffee house played witness to this shift: where once long tables covered in pipes had been surrounded by tobacco-smoking patrons, by the end of the eighteenth century men took snuff to protect their nerves against smells as they sat in their solitary, silent, boxes.