I’m for trust-your-reader too. I also agree that if your protagonist is young, they may not have started smoking yet; and I’ve read a number of my-first-cigarette accounts which make the habit sound absolutely nauseating.

Your post also made me think of this story, which may partly explain that haze of tobacco smoke in all those classic movies.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/10/thank_you_for_smoking.html

“Look, I hate smoking. It took my parents from me, my father with lung cancer, my mother with emphysema. They both liked Luckies. When my dad’s cancer was diagnosed, they played it safe and switched to Winstons. When my mother was breathing oxygen through a tube, she’d take out the tube, turn off the oxygen, and light up. I avoid smokers. It isn’t allowed in our house. When I see someone smoking, it feels like I’m watching them bleed themselves, one drip at a time.
So we’ve got that established. On the other hand, I have never objected to smoking in the movies, especially when it is necessary to establish a period or a personality.

I think some smoking is okay even in contemporary stories, if only to acknowledge it exists. Movies can’t rewrite reality. The MPAA cautiously mentions smoking in their descriptions of movie ratings (even if it’s the Cheshire Cat and his hookah). If, by the time you’re old enough to sit through a movie, you haven’t heard that smoking is bad for you, you don’t need a movie rating, you need a foster home.”

Lunamoth: I agree completely. I have books with teenage pregnancy. There’s a murder in my book that comes out next year. I’m definitely not advocating either one!

However, the history of smoking in the twentieth century is such a dark one and the tobacco industry’s glamorisation of smoking and supression of medical data about the extreme dangers of smoking are so appalling that it really bothers me to add to positive portrayals of smoking.

Further to the price of cigarettes. It was much more common to be able to buy them one at a time for cheap back then. Also loose tobacco was considerably cheaper than ready-made cigarettes.

Julie: My book will be addressing many of the issues you cite. There were many people at the time who actively fought against racism and for women’s reproductive rights. In the 1930s there was a booming African-American press that covered civil rights in great detail. Some of those papers (and there were many of them) had circulations of over 60,000, by the early forties even more. It’s definitely possible to portray the racist attitudes of the time while making it clear that you-the-author don’t advocate them.

I think smoking’s different, however, because its health effect weren’t widely known. In fact the opposite was true some doctors of the period advised patients to take up smoking for their health. The vast majority of the condemnations of smoking were on moral grounds not health.

The difference is, I think, very clear. While there were workers’ rights advocates and campaigners against racism and for women’s rights there was no movement saying, hey, smoking’s bad for your health not because it’s unladylike. That movement was twenty years away.

This doesn’t mean that a historical story has to tackle every ugly thing about an era, but if the smoking that was prevalent at the time distresses you so much, can you really write an honest story set in that period? Widespread smoking is perhaps one of the lesser things that a modern audience might find objectionable about the era. (Birth control was illegal, women were barely enfranchised, people of color weren’t enfranchised at all, there almost no regulations protecting consumers from tainted food or workers from inhumane conditions…)

BUT… in 1922, the “cigarette wars” began as some people started to believe they were bad. 15 states (not NY) banned their sale at this time.

@Michelle: 1931-06: Cigarette Price Wars begin. Cigs sold for 14 cents a pack, 2-for-27 cents in the depths of the depression. (Source – http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/tobacco/history2.htm)

After vascillating a whole bunch, I decided to stick to the prevailing attitudes of the time. Some people will criticize me for this. They’ll argue that I ‘m promoting smoking in young people. However, I give teens more credit than that and it is most important to me to be authentic. It’s what makes historical fiction just that.

My protag does not smoke, although he tries a cigar and does not care for it. It was important in my novel because it’s the story of a young jockey’s quick rise to fame and back then cigars were a sign of affluence. It was pertinent because my character, no matter how successful he becomes in his sport, always feels like an outsider. The rejection of the cigar was symbolic of that.

Just putting it out there.

My sister started smoking as a teenager. I tried it once, and after struggling not to throw up, asked how she could stand it – she said she felt sick too the first time she tried it, but she kept trying until she got used to it, because she wanted to seem more grown-up and hang out with the cool older girls.

I always found it a bit funny reading and hearing about people who didn’t know that smoking could kill you back in the day. My Nana harassed my mother into taking up smoking ‘to relax her’, it was such a scandalous and surprisingly cathartic story.

Then again, I’m an ex-smoker, so I might be suspect.

~kath

Or, you could have one of the non-smoking characters prefer something else (lipstick, going to the movies, pocket books) above smoking.

I have vague memories of villains with cigarettes and the occasional man with a pipe, but no smoking by the central crowd.

The first few Nancy Drews were reissued recently, with forwards by contemporary authors (if you’ve never read an original one, watch out for the casual bigotry).