Galsworthy's images of smoking in the forsyte chronicles

Fiction has an important contribution to make to our insight into the social background of the period in which it was written. Novelists often make use of contemporary habits and social mores to provide context for events or to delineate characters. This paper takes as its examples, the novelist, John Galsworthy, his novels the first two Forsyte trilogies, and the social habit of smoking. Galsworthy frequently uses the smoking image, not only in creating his characters but also for atmosphere. In these novels we are able to follow the progress of smoking from the occasional cigar smoked for pleasure at certain specific times by men only in the 1880's, through to the 1920's when the smoking of cigarettes had become ubiquitous for men and women—so much so that it was almost a social necessity in the middle class. Although the main subject of this paper is John Galsworthy, works of several of his contemporary novelists are introduced for comparison. Events of the period, including two wars, the General Strike, the emancipation of women and changes in the tobacco industry are related to the progress of smoking habits as depicted by Galsworthy. Galsworthy was himself a smoker, but his contemporary, Thomas Hardy, who rarely mentions smoking did not smoke and Conan Doyle, who often mentions it, was a smoker.