Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

In a private letter to me, which I am privileged to quote, Colonel Prideaux adds some further particulars as to the social attitude of early Victorian days towards tobacco—particulars which are the more valuable and interesting as being supplied from personal recollection of those now somewhat distant days. The Colonel writes: "When I was a young man people never thought of smoking in what house-agents call the 'reception-rooms,' the principal reason being that the occupation of these rooms was shared by ladies, and it was 'bad form' (not, by the way, a contemporary expression) to smoke while in the company of the fairer half of creation. Consequently, men had either to indulge in the practice out of doors, or else, as you say, sneak away to the kitchen when the servants had gone to bed, and puff up the chimney. It was only in large houses that a billiard room could be found, and even in a billiard room a pipe or cigar was taboo if ladies were present, while smoking-rooms could no more be found in middle-class houses than bath-rooms. Both cutties and churchwardens were smoked, but the latter of course were not adapted for persons engaged in active pursuits and were essentially of what I may call a sedentary nature. You could not even walk while holding a long churchwarden in your mouth, and consequently the short clay was most favoured by young men at Sandhurst and the Universities.... Labourers smoked short clays when out of doors, and churchwardens when they rested from their labours and took their ease in their inn in the evenings."

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

Addison and Steele smoked, and so did Prior, who seems to have had a weakness at times for low company. After spending an evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope and Swift, it is recorded that he would go "and smoke a pipe, and drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier and his wife, in Long Acre, before he went to bed." Some of Prior's poems, as Thackeray caustically remarks, smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Pope for awhile attended the symposium at Button's coffee-house, where Addison was the centre of the coterie—he describes himself as sitting with them till two in the morning over punch and Burgundy amid the fumes of tobacco—but such a way of life did not suit his sickly constitution, and he soon withdrew. It is not likely that he smoked.

Read More