Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

In a World of 1755 there is a description of a noisy, hearty, drinking, devil-may-care country gentleman, in which it is said, "he makes no scruple to take his pipe and pot at an alehouse with the very dregs of the people." In a Connoisseur of 1754 a fine gentleman from London, making a visit in a country-house, is taking his breakfast with the ladies in the afternoon, when they had their tea, for, says he, "I should infallibly have perished, had I staied in the hall, amidst the jargon of toasts and the fumes of tobacco." When Horace Walpole was staying with his father at his Norfolk country-seat, Houghton, in September 1737, Gray wrote to him from Cambridge: "You are in a confusion of wine, and roaring, and hunting, and tobacco, and, heaven be praised, you too can pretty well bear it." But Gray had no objection to tobacco. He lived at Cambridge, and the dons and residents there (as at Oxford), not to speak of the undergraduates, were as partial to their pipes as the men who went out from among them to become country parsons, and to share the country squire's liking for tobacco. Gray wrote to Warton from Cambridge in April 1749 saying: "Time will settle my conscience, time will reconcile me to this languid companion (ennui); we shall smoke, we shall tipple, we shall doze together"—a striking picture of University life in the sleepy days of the eighteenth century. Gray's testimony by no means stands alone. In November 1730 Roger North wrote to his son Montague, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, saying: "I would be loath you should confirm the scandal charged upon the universities of learning chiefly to smoke and to drink."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

The more fashionable folk of the Restoration Era and later began to leave off if not to disdain the smoking-habit. Up to about 1700 smoking had been permitted in the public rooms at Bath, but when Nash then took charge, tobacco was banished. Public or at least fashionable taste had begun to change, and Nash correctly interpreted and led it. Sorbière, who has been quoted in the previous chapter, remarked in 1663 that "People of Quality" did not use tobacco so much as others; and towards the end of the century and in Queen Anne's time the tendency was for tobacco to go out of fashion. This did not much affect its general use; but the tendency—with exceptions, no doubt—was to restrict the use of tobacco to the clergy, to country squires, to merchants and tradesmen and to the humbler ranks of society—to limit it, in short, to the middle and lower classes of the social commonwealth as then organized. In the extraordinary record of inanity which Addison printed as the diary of a citizen in the Spectator of March 4, 1712, the devotion of the worthy retired tradesman to tobacco is emphasized. This is the kind of thing: "Monday ... Hours 10, 11 and 12 Smoaked three Pipes of Virginia ... one o'clock in the afternoon, chid Ralph for mislaying my Tobacco-Box.... Wednesday ... From One to Two Smoaked a Pipe and a half.... Friday ... From Four to Six. Went to the Coffee-house. Met Mr. Nisby there. Smoaked several Pipes."

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