I

In her magisterial Catalogue of personal and political satires in the British Museum, M. Dorothy George described James Gillray's A smoking club (BMC 8303; Figure 1) as a burlesque of the House of Commons, ‘a smoking-club, a plebeian gathering in which quarrelsome members were wont to puff smoke at each other’.Footnote ¹ This satiric print was first published in 1793 by J. Aiken on Castle Street, Leicester Fields. It was reissued by Hannah Humphrey, sometime after 1797, when she moved her thriving print shop to the fashionable address of St James Street in London's West End. The lasting appeal of A smoking club prompted Humphrey to reprint it at least into the early nineteenth century.Footnote ² Humphrey displayed Gillray's satires in her print shop window, where they would be seen by clientele and politicians frequenting the area. Some would enter to browse her stock and make purchases. Wealthy elites collected such prints in albums where they would be shared, often among company, as fodder for social gossip and political comment. Understanding the nuanced humour of Gillray's political parody rested on the ability of his audiences not only to identify the persons depicted but also to negotiate the tensions of civility and impoliteness, and of political commentary and moral derision represented in this and other contemporary satiric prints of smoking clubs.

Figure 1.

James Gillray. A smoking club, 1793 (1797 reprint), etching with hand colouring, BMC 8303.

Source: Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 793.02.13.01.1+.

Scenes of smoking clubs, and of tobacco smoking more generally, were ubiquitous in graphic satire in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Computer-assisted analysis conducted by Andrew Salway and James Baker for their ‘Curatorial voice project’ identifies 408 results for the word ‘pipe’ in the dataset of descriptions of satirical prints published between 1770 and 1832 in the British Museum collections online. Tellingly, ‘pipe’ figures in the top 300 most frequent keywords in George's catalogue.Footnote ³ This notable presence of pipe smoking as a trope in graphic satire during this period suggests that such imagery carried a strong cachet, and accordingly can tell us a great deal about contemporary views on the intoxicating effects of smoking tobacco, its social context, and, most interestingly for our purposes here, the varied facets of cultural and political understandings that satiric representations of smoking clubs potentially insinuated for contemporaries.

Delineated with imaginative, humorous licence, graphic satire does not necessarily provide straightforward, reliable evidence of specific realities or of actual smoking clubs but rather offers representations of contemporary notions. In his recent work on parody in satiric prints, David Francis Taylor posits that ‘caricature is an intermedial form’, one which appeals to an ‘educated eye’ and requires sophisticated cultural knowledge to negotiate sophisticated content.Footnote ⁴ If effective political and social satire generally relies on, and then subverts or builds on, certain cultural knowledge and well-established iconographies, then the ways in which visual satirists in eighteenth-century Britain used joking scenes of smoking clubs to comment both humorously and derisively on national topics – political and social – necessarily resonated with contemporary viewpoints. Familiarity with tobacco as an intoxicant within clubbing practices, as well as with a spectrum of existing visual tropes of smoking, must underlie potential understandings of satiric prints that feature social smoking. Following Taylor's contention, this article begins with the premise that Gillray's joking comparison of political leaders with ordinary smoking club members depended on his viewers’ knowledge of the well-established practice of sociable smoking, the cultural currency surrounding it, and a preceding visual iconography.

By the later eighteenth century, the smoking club – real or imagined, generic or specific – as subject for satiric prints both reflected and rested on a thorough assimilation of sociable tobacco smoking as an English cultural practice.Footnote ⁵ The satirical punch of visual tropes in Gillray's A smoking club drew on a long and deep-rooted history of masculine clubbing in which tobacco, as an intoxicant, along with alcohol, figured prominently in the practice of masculine sociability and identity formation among affluent social groups.Footnote ⁶ Associational life – so well entrenched by the eighteenth century – was the legacy of an early modern form of collectivism that Phil Withington defines as ‘voluntary and purposeful’ and identifies as a ‘more general exercise of public authority’ that was ‘embedded in companies, societies, and incorporated bodies’.Footnote ⁷ This long history of political oligarchy sustained through sociability, hospitality, and mutuality certainly underlies Gillray's late eighteenth-century political parody of members of the House of Commons gathered as a smoking club. By the date of Gillray's print, the rituals, conventions, modes of discourse, frequent use of intoxicants, and material objects (including tobacco pipes) that shaped company and sociability, according to Withington, would have been familiar to all knowing audiences.Footnote ⁸

II

Gillray's A smoking club ostensibly illustrates a congenial group of five gentlemen, a club, gathered around a tavern table to smoke and drink as a typical, if perhaps unflattering, British activity. Billowing smoke fills the space. A punchbowl and a frothy beer mug sit on the table, perhaps distinguishing the status of the respective drinkers.Footnote ⁹ Both beer and punch were considered respectable alcoholic beverages in stark contrast to gin, for example, which was deemed a dangerous vice of London's lower classes, as so famously contrasted in William Hogarth's pair of prints Beer street and Gin lane (1751).Footnote ¹⁰ In addition to drink, all the men in Gillray's print puff tobacco in English-manufactured clay pipes, which can be distinguished by their length and the size of their bowl from the shorter pipes of the Indigenous peoples of North America.Footnote ¹¹ The polite civility of diverting smoke from the faces of companions made possible by the elongated English pipes is, however, completely eschewed by Gillray's smokers. While wisps of smoke issue from their diminutive pipe bowls, the intoxicated club members deliberately exhale great clouds directly at each other. Smoking here becomes a jesting sign both of contemplative thought and of the engagement of fellowship. At the same time, the smoke itself humorously intoxicates as it simultaneously conceals and reveals darker aspects of the characters and hidden agendas of the club members.

Although they engage in impolite behaviour, the members of this smoking club were not at all the plebeians of George's later description in complicity with Gillray's derisive humour cited above. Any fashionable patron of Humphrey's print shop or collector of Gillray's prints would immediately recognize this smoking club as a meeting of leading politicians easily identifiable by Gillray's signature caricatured depictions. Seated on benches around a long narrow table, two tory statesmen, Prime Minister William Pitt and Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, on the near side, face the opposition leaders, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan across the table. The parliamentary setting is indicated by a suggestion of the gallery columns of the House of Commons. At the head of the table (left), Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, sits in a raised armchair in the manner of the chairman at a tavern club. He dons the hat, wig, and gown of the speaker.Footnote ¹² His mace has been transformed into a crutch-like stick. Addington aims voluminous plumes of smoke at the benches of both parties – a visual pun made by the tavern benches. Pitt, on the speaker's right, holds a frothing tankard inscribed with George III's monogram ‘G.R.’ and directs a cloud of smoke at Fox, who puffs back. Before Fox is a tray of pipes and a paper of tobacco, signifying his reputation for abuse of intoxicants; he is commonly depicted in contemporary caricatures as a dissipated gambler, drinker, and libertine. On the extreme right, Dundas, draped in plaid, dips a ladle into a punchbowl also inscribed ‘G.R.’, while puffing at Sheridan, who is depicted with his characteristic, red drunkard's nose as he sits across the table next to Fox.

Gillray's early cataloguer Thomas Wright described A smoking club as a ‘caricature of the position of affairs in the House of Commons [as] a clever view of the smoke in which the chiefs of either side freely clouded their antagonists’, astutely drawing out the metaphor of tobacco intoxication and muddied political debate.Footnote ¹³ In her study of the intersection of polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England, Kate Davison has posited a useful way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability that permits the breaking down of a binary opposition of polite and impolite, elite and popular in theory and practice, challenging us to rethink eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion.Footnote ¹⁴ Accordingly, she describes a category of ‘intimate bawdiness’ that permitted ‘a tacit acceptance of looser manners’ under circumstances of an appropriate level of familiarity that allowed for polite prudence to be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. An option that co-existed alongside politeness, ‘intimate bawdiness’ follows a lasting tradition of bawdy forms of gentlemanly sociability that might include the excessive, impolite tobacco smoking enjoyed by Gillray's parodied parliamentarians.

By the eighteenth century, the practice of smoking tobacco had a long history of migration from North America, where it was introduced to British (and European) settlers by Indigenous peoples, back to the metropole, where it quickly became domesticated and entrenched for better or worse in British society and culture. The correspondence of Horace Walpole and his circle provides useful insights about the contradictory allure and repulsion of tobacco. Writing from Peterhouse, Cambridge, on 17 November 1734, Thomas Gray opens his letter on the pervasive use of tobacco in male fashionable society with an epigram that is an adaptation of one attributed to Glycon: ‘All is Dust, and all is pie, and all is tobacco.’ In the body of his letter, Gray sets out to prove to Walpole that, indeed, ‘everything is tobacco’, for it

Walpole's friend William Cole, on the other hand, wishes for tobacco, now thoroughly British, writing that ‘I wish I could smoke tobacco, which would amuse the evenings, which injure the eyes more than the daylight, but I cannot even go on with the British herb tobacco.’Footnote ¹⁶

III

While debates about the virtues and vices of tobacco, which originated in the late sixteenth century, continued into the eighteenth century, sociable smoking nevertheless evolved into a thoroughly English practice.Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, by the later eighteenth century, scenes of intoxicated clubbing had become an established visual trope in British prints, most famously codified in the works of William Hogarth, whose long pictorial legacy reached well beyond his lifetime. In her landmark social history Hogarth to Cruikshank: social change in graphic satire, M. Dorothy George states that ‘in any view of eighteenth-century London there should be a tavern scene and a gaming house’.Footnote ¹⁸ Leaving aside the complex issues of satire as historic evidence, George's account of Hogarth's iconic image of tavern clubbing, A midnight modern conversation (1732; Figure 2), as an early archetypal representation of British sociable smoking is useful to my point.Footnote ¹⁹ In this scene, eleven men, at various stages of inebriation, many with wigs askew or missing, gather in a well-furnished, panelled room, perhaps a public house. The late hour of the male debauchery is indicated by the case clock at the left back corner, which reads 4 o'clock, presumably a.m. Upon the tavern table sits a large chinoiserie punchbowl. The mantelpiece is piled with bottles, which also litter the floor. In the foreground, a drunken man leaning on a chair for support inadvertently pours wine on his prostrate companion, who has tumbled to the floor in an overturned chair. Five members of the party smoke pipes. Only two issue small plumes of smoke. A broken pipe lies discarded on the floor. According to George, the only ‘toper’ who is completely master of himself is the parson beside the brimming punchbowl: this is clearly Cornelius Ford, ‘whom no amount of liquor could disturb’. Included in the group are a tipsy tobacconist, whose singing of bacchanalian songs admitted him to tavern society, a rakish beau, a barrister, and a military officer, prone on the floor, while the man tipsily spilling liquor over him is a physician.Footnote ²⁰

Figure 2.

William Hogarth, A midnight modern conversation, 1732, state 3, etching and engraving, BMC 2122.

Source: Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, folio 75 H67 800 v.1.

Though Hogarth asserted ‘think not to find one meant resemblance here’, scholars have identified specific portraits as well as social types in A midnight modern conversation. In pinpointing Hogarth's characters as actual historical individuals, George is following early chroniclers of Hogarth's prints, such as John Nichols, George Steevens, and John Ireland. Ireland quotes the full engraved verse that was added to Hogarth's plate sometime after its publication, denying any resemblance to individuals and instead presenting the prints as depicting only general social vice:

Ireland nevertheless argues that this postscript is merely a conceit contending that ‘it is very certain that most of these figures were intended for individual portraits but Mr. Hogarth, not wishing to be considered as a personal satirist, and fearful of making enemies among his contemporaries [sic], would never acknowledge who were the characters’. He goes on to identify individuals, faithfully portrayed in ‘compleat inebriation’. Ireland claims, ‘upon the authority of Sir John Hawkins, of Anecdotish memory’, that the cleric is John Henley, the high priest of Clare Market. He corroborates his assertion by comparison to a known portrait sketch, noting that ‘our smoking parson’ is characteristically exhibited with a corkscrew, which is occasionally used as a tobacco-stopper, hanging upon his little finger.Footnote ²²

No matter the identity of the individuals, Hogarth's vivid characterization of intoxicated merriment fascinated diverse audiences throughout his lifetime and beyond. His scene of raucous male drinking and smoking in the metropole circulated widely throughout England, the continent, and even the colonies as original prints, pirated copies, posthumous restrikes by later publishers, and many later copies. It decorated punchbowls and teacups and elicited a lengthy description in verse.Footnote ²³ It was the origin of a play at Covent Garden ‘taken from Hogarth's celebrated print’. There were copies in France and Germany, where travelling showmen exhibited wax figures of the characters (1786). The verses on one of the French copies make it an illustration of national character: ‘Chaque peuple a son gout: — the Frenchman sings, the Italian has his concert, the German the pleasures of the table, for the Englishman sa Ponche et la Pipe.’Footnote ²⁴

A broadside titled The bacchanalians, or, a midnight modern conversation includes a poem addressed to Hogarth.Footnote ²⁵ This altered but clearly appropriated scene and composition contains a lengthy verse, which calls out the artist's ubiquitous humour in illustrating how midnight modern conversations ‘mingle all faculties and stations’, uniting ‘the Priest, the Beau, the Cit, the Bite; Where Law & Physic join the Sword, and Justice deigns to Crown ye Board’. Here, ‘no loftier theme’ is pursued than ‘punch, good company and dues’. Yet the verse also presents the tavern, with intoxicating drink and smoke, as a site of political debate: ‘to boast of Crimes, or tell ye Shame, of raking talk or Reformation, Tis all good Modern Conversation’. The business of the nation is here taken up by tradesmen who discuss credit and taxes as parliaments and great men count losses and debts.

Purveyors of tobacco likewise embraced the raucous revelry of intoxicated smoking and drinking represented in Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation and appropriated his clubbing scene for smoke shop advertisements. A shop card for Richard Lee at ‘ye Golden Tobacco’ adapted Hogarth's scene with the addition of a framed painting of a black boy and possibly another of a reclining Native American hanging on the back wall as obvious references to the colonial origins of tobacco.Footnote ²⁶ Catherine Molineux contends that tobacconists banked on the appeal of exoticism when they used images of New World peoples, often a hybrid of Native American and African figures, to tempt potential customers with images that ‘suggested a complex interaction of ideologies of empire, the social experience of smoking, and the cultural meanings of tobacco’.Footnote ²⁷ Lauren Working argues somewhat differently that the appeal of tobacco was related to the thrill of colonizing America and subjugating its peoples, and gentlemen consciously framed masculine civility in relation to their role as colonizers.Footnote ²⁸

An empty tobacco paper inscribed ‘Freemans Best’ placed on the table in A midnight modern conversation establishes a specific link between Hogarth's club scene and an actual tobacco shop. In a reciprocal reference, a shop card for Freeman's tobacco paper engraved by George Bickham the Elder is likewise an obvious, although cropped, borrowing from A midnight modern conversation.Footnote ²⁹ Another close appropriation of Hogarth's club scene is a painted copy at the Yale Center for British Art, which is elongated horizontally to the proportions of a probable shop sign or overdoor for a tavern.Footnote ³⁰ In both these later cases, references to empire are absent as in Hogarth's original archetypal scene, reasserting tobacco smoking as a thoroughly British practice, centred in the metropole, and one that has become so ingrained that it can stand as an effective trope for parody of British society and politics.

The question then is why was Hogarth's enormously popular composition so blatantly appropriated as a trade card for tobacconists? Other relatively staid representations of social smoking and drinking, such as James Worsdale's painting of The Limerick Hell Fire Club (c. 1736) or the group portrait of Elihu Yale seated at table with the second duke of Devonshire and Lord James Cavendish (c . 1708), were available options.Footnote ³¹ The raucous Hogarthian composition, then, presumably carried a favourable connotation and the pervasive adaptation of the iconic scene as an advertisement for tobacconists must indicate that contemporaries identified this positive aspect in the intoxicated debauchery so humorously, yet convivially, depicted. Thus, the reception and early interpretation of Hogarth's comic print confirm that smoking was widely understood as an act of male sociability, which could at once sell tobacco in shops and taverns and attract clientele to establishments offering both drink and smoke. Moralizing content that may have been gleaned from earlier Dutch genre scenes of lower orders in this new context has accordingly receded and been replaced with humorous connotations of society and good company for middling and elite classes. Similarly, even during the campaign against gin in the mid-eighteenth century, a light-hearted composition illustrating a husband burdened by his drunken wife sitting upon his shoulders served as a sign for a public house in Oxford Street.Footnote ³²

IV

If the character of eighteenth-century London clubs was ambivalent, the history of clubs dedicated as smoking clubs per se is even more elusive, perhaps because of their informal nature.Footnote ³³ Vagueness begins with Samuel Johnson's definition of the club simply as ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’.Footnote ³⁴ Johnson was a notable character of eighteenth-century club life, and his name is connected with a number of social clubs, which held their meetings at coffeehouses and taverns.Footnote ³⁵ Initially, clubbing seems to have been an informal arrangement for sharing the cost of drinks or a feast rather than a regular meeting or institutionalized establishment with a fixed agenda.

How much were clubs dedicated to smoking a distinct reality as compared to a powerful jesting idea? By 1800, clubs and other forms of association had become a vital component of the social life of the educated English-speaking classes. In his history of British clubs and societies, 1580–1800, Peter Clark states that clubs and societies were widely regarded ‘as a distinctly British phenomenon’.Footnote ³⁶ He calculates that during the eighteenth century there may have been up to 25,000 different clubs and societies and over 130 different types of societies meeting in the English-speaking world. ‘Clubs and societies’, he asserts, ‘became one of the most distinctive social and cultural institutions of Georgian Britain.’Footnote ³⁷ Primarily urban phenomena, these associations were nearly always restricted to men, although members were recruited from a wide spread of age groups and social backgrounds. The image and concept of the voluntary society penetrated every nook and cranny of British social and cultural life.Footnote ³⁸ The abundance of satiric prints on the theme corroborates this.

Markman Ellis has observed that ‘A coffee-house exists to sell coffee, but the coffee-house cannot simply be reduced to this retail function.’ Following Samuel Johnson's definition of a coffeehouse as ‘a house of entertainment where coffee is sold, and the guests are supplied with newspapers’, Ellis suggests that, more than being a place that sells coffee, ‘a coffee-house is also an idea, a way of life, a mode of socializing, a philosophy’.Footnote ³⁹ The smoking club similarly carried complex cultural connotations. Just as the coffeehouse provided a social and cultural space for political and intellectual debate, the smoking club also offered opportunity for convivial socializing, characteristically under the intoxication of tobacco and usually with heavy or excessive drinking.Footnote ⁴⁰ While coffeehouses were physical establishments widely distributed throughout London and the provinces, with a well-documented and much-studied history, the more informal smoking club which had no ties to particular premises and which met in coffeehouses or taverns, as well as rooms of separate establishment, has been less studied.

Valérie Capdeville, in describing the ambivalent functions of clubs, notes that the first ones appeared in London during the Restoration period and answered both a need for social intercourse and an aspiration towards political freedom or defiance.Footnote ⁴¹ She further comments that ‘dining and drinking, gambling and conversation were the chief motivations for such gatherings and enabled clubmen to share their political, scientific or artistic interests in a convivial and “safe” male-only environment’.Footnote ⁴² Nonetheless, in a letter to his friend Horace Mann, Horace Walpole quipped that, while ‘the nominal qualification of being elected a member of the illustrious Society of Dilettanti is having been to Italy . . . the real one [is] being drunk’.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, although the members of the Society of Dilettanti in Thomas Patch's large-scale caricature painting The golden asses do not partake of tobacco, smoking was a significant part of such drunken gatherings on a wider scale.Footnote ⁴⁴ Richard Newton's Soulagement en prison; or, comfort in prison (1793) commemorates the social gathering of historical figures imprisoned at Newgate for sedition or similar offences and their friends who visited and dined with them.Footnote ⁴⁵ The thirteen men sit around an oval table in Windsor armchairs, smoking long pipes, drinking, and sharing convivial company. The identities of the diners are given via a numbering system keyed to names engraved beneath the design. Among the prisoners is William Holland, the publisher of the print.

Certainly, then, social smoking was a prominent part of eighteenth-century club life, but what can we know about the existence of actual smoking clubs? James Walvin outlines the shift of tobacco smoking from exclusive taste in the early seventeenth century to pervasiveness in a broader, more popular consuming public for whom taverns became the most common spaces for smoking. Despite the proliferation of specialist tobacco shops, alehouses and taverns were the main retail outlet across England and actively promoted tobacco by inviting customers to take a pipe with their drink.Footnote ⁴⁶ Ralph Neville's reminiscence London clubs records traditional lore that smoking was allowed at public club meetings, except at a few of the most aristocratic coffee- or chocolate houses.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, he offers no elaboration or documented testimonial. Even more surprisingly perhaps, neither ‘smoking’ nor ‘tobacco’ appears in the index to Clark's comprehensive work on British clubs.

The challenge, noted by Clark, for documenting the history of clubs is that newspapers frequently provide our only reference for many of these informal societies.Footnote ⁴⁸ A search for the term ‘smoking club’ in online databases of eighteenth-century newspapers frustratingly produces few results, although these scant references may enrich our understanding of the connotations of smoking clubs. In addition to repeat advertisements for popular satiric prints of smoking clubs,Footnote ⁴⁹ even rarer newspaper notices appear to link smoking club members with dissident or even criminal behaviour. On 4 October 1806, a report on the Westminster election in the Morning Post described the proceedings and character of the ‘soi-disant Electors of Westminster, at the Crown and Anchor’, as ‘a riotous meeting’ of a ‘factious junto’. Regardless of the specific complaints, what interests us here is the evocation of that junto ‘that wished to degrade the Electors of Westminster, by assuming their name and character, merely to produce a scene of riot and confusion, in which a few foolish smoking club orators and parish politicians might have an opportunity of declaiming to a larger mob’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, a notice of proceedings at the Old Bailey from 19 September 1807 reinforces a low social status and other negative connotations of smoking club members as being from labouring classes. A prisoner, although found not guilty of the murder, and the deceased are connected to a smoking club where they were both members and had quarrelled.Footnote ⁵¹

Still another less nefarious but belittling mention of a smoking club appears on the front page of the Whitehall Evening Post for September 1784:

It is difficult to imagine that there is not considerable jest in this report of quasi-scientific pursuit paired with the ridiculous goal of excessive smoking to fill the balloon. Satiric texts such as Laurence Dermott's Ahiman Rezon list smoking clubs among such other ludicrous societies as the no nose club, the long nose club, and the farting club to name just three, ‘not worth notice, whose chief practice consists in eating, drinking, singing, smoaking, &c’.Footnote ⁵³

V

This suggestion of smoking as characteristic of the uncivil and the inane underlies many of Gillray's effective parodies. Notably, for our purposes, his satires of clubs for smoking and drinking nominally include actual historical societies. Anacreontick's in full song (1801; Figure 3) parodies the London society founded in 1766 for amateur musicians from aristocrat to professional, which in fact met at a series of taverns and coffeehouses.Footnote ⁵⁴ The print clearly borrows all the stock elements of Hogarth's iconic club scene in A midnight modern conversation: much-caricatured jovial, intoxicated men are gathered for a drink and a smoke around a tavern table. Some wildly gesticulate, toasting or singing, while others sleep under the influence. As in Hogarth's print, a clock on the wall, here set to 3:40, indicates that the frivolity has extended into the wee hours of the morning. To underscore the midnight drunken carousing, the clock is decorated with a carved bacchanalian figure of Time sitting astride a cask. A portrait of the society's mascot, Anacreon, hangs on the wall on the other side.

Figure 3.

James Gillray, Anacreontick's in full song, 1801, etching with hand colouring, BMC 9764.

Source: Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 801.12.01.09+.

In the spectrum of the satiric view of the smoking club, there is an ever-present tension, albeit light-hearted, between civil conversation, elite masculinity, and degeneration/immorality. Such humorous embrace of potential degeneration was presumably safe among the knowing elite audiences who consumed these luxury images that embody a nuanced understanding about how civility/incivility worked together in sophisticated ways in English sociability.Footnote ⁵⁵ The imagery of graphic satire must be seen as ‘part of a nexus of images and discourses in contemporary culture’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Interestingly, Gillray's A smoking club has precedence in more light-hearted humorous scenes. Other caricaturists tried their hand at smoking club scenes as well. For example, the drawing A new way to find out a customer!! by the gentleman artist G. M. Woodward, issued as a print in March 1800 by William Holland, portrays a smoke-filled room in which an innkeeper humorously uses a bellows to clear dense tobacco smoke from the tavern interior in order to help a servant find his master in the crowd.Footnote ⁵⁷ The innkeeper proclaims, ‘You say you want a little gentleman in a brown wig. I have really so much smoking business in my parlour that ’till I make use of the bellows I can never distinguish a customer, I believe that is the gentleman you mean.’ The servant excitedly responds in dialect ‘Yes, Yes, sure enough that be Master, but before he vanishes again, tell him that Missis has sent the street door key.’ Woodward's scene, in which smoke obfuscates the man, corroborates the insinuation in Gillray's print that smoking clouds the political debate. In Hogarth's Time smoking a picture (1761), pipe smoke becomes a means of trickery.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this print, issued by the artist as a subscription ticket for his history painting Sigismunda, which he painted to contest the preferred status of continental old master paintings over work by contemporary English artists, smoke highlights the derision that prompted the embittered pictorial diatribe. The figure of Time as an old winged man sits on a broken statue, blowing pipe smoke at a landscape painting on the easel in front of him. He has pierced the canvas with his scythe. A large jar labelled ‘Varnish’ sits on the floor. Here the darkening pipe smoke ‘ages’ the painting so it can be deceptively presented to foolish collectors as an old master work with darkened varnish.

The smoking club of graphic satire also includes the amusing social gatherings in the prints of Henry William Bunbury, whose social caricatures were rendered with more light-hearted, gentle humour. Bunbury was an amateur gentleman artist, praised by Horace Walpole in his Anecdotes of painting in England as ‘the second Hogarth’, whose ‘rank and bashful merit’ and ‘too rare exertion of superior talents, confine the proofs to a narrow circle’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although the denial of public recognition and commercial interest reflect the rhetoric of amateur status of the gentleman artist, Bunbury's images were indeed intended for elite audiences – the same audiences who would appreciate the inside jokes of Gillray's politically oriented smoking club of parliamentarians. Among Bunbury's light satires, and the works of those who followed him, are several prints of smoking clubs or club night gatherings. For example, The smoaking club (1792) by Charles Knight after H. W. Bunbury portrays a familiar scene of men, here elderly, all smoking long pipes.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some are sleepy, others puff smoke at each other. On the wall is a framed notice of rules that underscore key elements of the parody of smoking club satires, including Gillray's A smoking club. The first rule, echoing the farcical implication of excessive smoking implied in the balloon experiment, states that ‘No Gemman to be a member of this Society who cannot smoke three pipes at one sitting’. Another rule, underscoring the offence of every member of Gillray's A smoking club, is that ‘Any member who puffs designedly in the face of another, to be find six-pence or be puff'd at in return by the whole company’. Artists other than Bunbury also provided more gentle caricatures, including the City smoking club by an unknown artist, published by Holland in 1788.

On the other hand, Gillray's A smoking club is clearly not alone in pairing smoking with overtly political satire. In fact, early in his career, Gillray himself experimented with more generic parodies of politics and smoking as in The country politicians (1784), published by Hannah Humphrey's older brother, William, from his premises on the Strand.Footnote ⁶¹ Here a parson and barber smoke profusely while a squire wearing spectacles reads the news from a broadside. Likewise, Thomas Rowlandson's bumbling character Doctor Syntax finds himself in heated debate with pipe in hand by the hearth of a crowded tavern. The title, Doctor Syntax in the middle of a smoaking hot political squabble. . . (c. 1813; Figure 4), cleverly makes explicit the connection of smoking and politics.Footnote ⁶²

Figure 4.

Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Syntax in the middle of a smoaking hot political squabble…, c. 1813, etching and stipple with hand colouring.

Source: Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 813.00.00.04+.

Notably, even Hogarth's archetypal A midnight modern conversation included more specific political connotations, which his contemporary audiences would certainly have understood. Ronald Paulson suggests that Hogarth's inclusion of the London Journal and the Craftsman in the pocket of the man at the far right indicates that this character is a politician. Paulson further posits that these publications were propaganda journals of Walpole and the opposition, respectively, and thus the presence of the magazines serves as a connection between tobacco, wine, and spirits being consumed and the excise being proposed on those ‘essentials’.Footnote ⁶³

Moreover, it is not a big leap from Rowlandson's fictional and generic print back to Gillray's appropriation of smoking as metaphor for the machinations of particular politicians. In A smoking club, Gillray's evocation of pipe smoke as a metaphor for the pitfalls of uncivil communication that can ensnare political debate among adversaries forms a most effective foundation for his parody. This pairing of politics and smoking which expresses the tensions over behaviour of gentlemen holding contrasting political opinions is a subject he took up in other prints as well. Two more examples will make the point. God save the king, in a bumper, or, an evening scene three times a week at Wimbleton (1795) portrays the tory politicians Dundas and Pitt drunkenly toasting the king.Footnote ⁶⁴ Dundas, draped in plaid, holds his glass for a refill, while Pitt, leg splayed on the tabletop, tipsily tries to pour from an upside-down bottle, spilling its contents. Dundas smokes, while Pitt's broken pipe lies on the table littered with empty bottles and glasses. In The feast of reason & the flow of soul, i.e., the wits of the age setting the table in a roar (1797), the politician John Courtenay (1738–1816), as the chairman of a tavern club, sits smoking at the head of an oblong table.Footnote ⁶⁵ Addressing George Hanger, who faces him at the foot of the table, he remarks: ‘I say, Georgey how do Things look now?’ The words issue from their mouths in irregularly shaped speech bubbles delineated as clouds of smoke. Hanger answers: ‘Ax my Grandmother's Muff, pray do!’ He holds a pipe, his wine glass is overturned, and his bludgeon is thrust in his top boot. On Hanger's right sits Charles James Fox, who leans back in his chair and utters with amusement, ‘O charming! – charming!’ Opposite Fox sits Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who clasps a decanter of ‘Brandy’ in one hand, a glass in the other. He says, with a sly smile, ‘Excellent! – damme Georgey, Excellent’. Next to him, and on Courtenay's right, is M. A. Taylor, who flourishes his pipe as he exclaims, ‘Bravo! the best Thing I ever heard said, damme’. On the table are decanters of ‘Mum’ and ‘Champaig[n]’. Above Courtenay's head is a framed picture of a simian creature in a cap of liberty, squatting on the ground and smoking a pipe.Footnote ⁶⁶

The particularly strong, barbed metaphorical ridicule of politics, both official and informal, in satiric prints of smoking clubs is underscored by contemporary testimony and explicit connection between smoking and political contests made by Henry Seymour Conway in a letter of 16 February 1741 to Horace Walpole. Conway describes the way that Sir Robert Walpole's opponents drown their feuds in tobacco, writing,

More generally, Clark observes that Irish and British governments were widely ridiculed as societies of loquacious, corrupt, and foolish nonentities, particularly clubs.Footnote ⁶⁸

VI

Whether political and social parody, imagined gatherings, or commemorations of actual smoking clubs, representations in graphic satire demonstrate the assimilation of smoking as a thoroughly British social practice, which was linked with clubbing, another widely recognized British cultural phenomenon. The smoking club of graphic satire is at once an amusing social gathering in the prints of H. W. Bunbury and an image of solidarity among political prisoners in Richard Newton's Soulagement en prison. Smoking could also derisively suggest more nefarious activity in smoke-filled rooms populated with dishonest politicians, who disingenuously ‘blow smoke’ at each other in works like James Gillray's A smoking club.

The gatherings of elites at printshop windows, around folios of caricatures in the libraries of private collectors, or sharing the entertainment of rented albums were all sociable exercises in themselves. In such convivial consumption of political satire – images of smoking clubs among them – we can imagine a knowing, shared viewership to demarcate a discrete elite audience, one that functioned as a virtual social cadre, even a club, bound by a common understanding of inside jokes or parodied sociability in much the same way that David Francis Taylor describes the circulation of caricatures within a reasonable elite literary culture that actively fostered and sequestered that culture in important ways.Footnote ⁶⁹ Gillray's A smoking club offers multi-faceted options for the interpretation of intoxicated clubbing. The imagery can at once be understood as a scene of gentlemanly sociability, even intimate bawdiness, and at the same time convey underlying connotations of domestic oligarchic power and global empire that associative behaviour fostered. Further, the act itself of knowing viewing of satiric prints by contemporaries provided agency to join people together as a form of sociability and intimate bawdiness, just as did the social construct of intoxication by tobacco and drink in ‘smoking clubs’.