Notes and Documents

Pleasures of the Smoke: "Black Virginians" in Georgian London's Tobacco Shops

Catherine Molineux

Bacchus' black servant, negro fine —Charles Lamb, referring to his pipe (ca. 1805)1
SOMETIME during the 1750s or 1760s, London grocer George Farr solicited an engraver to produce an advertisement for his tobacco (Figure I). Trade directories list Farr in the grocery business during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, but exactly when this advertisement was commissioned and who produced it are unknown, since it is unsigned and undated. Though the details of the advertisement's production remain frustratingly difficult to ascertain, the imagery with which Farr chose to tempt customers is striking for its effacement of the real origins of tobacco sold in Georgian England. Above the happy little pun "The Finest Tobacco by Farr," the engraver depicted a black prince or king sporting a Native American headdress and sitting on a throne.2 The royal black male takes up almost the entire advertisement, replacing the white colonial planter in his mediation between the hogsheads of new tobacco and the ships that have arrived to transport them elsewhere. The thousands of African slaves who worked Georgian tobacco fields in Virginia, Maryland, and other British colonies do not appear; the cherubic child who brings him a tobacco plant is the only other figure associated with the crop. This advertisement connected tobacco with the black male body yet spectacularly failed to acknowledge the existence of the colonial plantation. Instead it envisioned the tobacco trade as an exchange with a black prince or king: a vision perhaps naive, perhaps consciously effacing of the brutal realities of tobacco production, perhaps subtly subversive of plantation power relations, and certainly silent about the role of African women in the cultivation of British tobacco.	1
Figure I "The Finest Tobacco by Farr," London, ca. 1750–70, in Heal Collection, 117.48, Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum, London.
The imagined origins of tobacco in tobacco shop advertisements complicate modern historians' understanding of the intersection of race, consumption, and male homosociality in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London.3 Though tobacco has long been considered an important factor shaping the development of New World settlements and colonial practices of slavery, scholars have only begun to analyze the ways in which tobacco, sugar, and other Atlantic and Eastern goods engendered new forms of sociability and new spaces of consumption in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There is still a limited understanding of the cultural meanings that Londoners attached to exotic drugs and how those meanings shaped and were themselves shaped by notions of race, conceptions of slavery, and ideologies of empire.4	. . .