Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

The country gentlemen of the time followed the hounds and enjoyed rural sports of all kinds, drank ale, and smoked tobacco. They had their smoking-rooms too. Walter Gale, schoolmaster at Mayfield, Sussex, noted in his Journal under date March 26, 1751: "I went to Mr. Baker's for the list of scholars, and found him alone in the smoaking-room; he ordered a pint of mild beer for me, an extraordinary thing." Gale himself was a regular smoker, and too fond of pints of ale.

Fielding has immortalized the squire of the mid-eighteenth century in his picture of that sporting, roaring, swearing, drinking, smoking, affectionate, irascible, blundering, altogether extraordinary owner of broad acres, Squire Western. We may shrewdly suspect that the portrait of Western is somewhat over-coloured, and cannot fairly be taken as typical; but there is sufficient evidence to show that in some respects at least—in his enthusiasm for sport and love of ale and tobacco—Western is representative of the country squires of his day.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Other illustrations of folk who smoked, not cigars, but pipes, may be drawn from "Pickwick," which was published in 1836. At the very beginning, when Mr. Pickwick calls a cab at Saint Martin's-le-Grand, the first cab is "fetched from the public-house, where he had been smoking his first pipe." At Rochester, Mr. Pickwick makes notes on the four towns of Strood, Rochester, Chatham and Brompton, where the military were present in strength, and hence the observant gentleman noted—"The consumption of tobacco in these towns must be very great: and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking." On the evening of the election at Eatanswill, Tupman and Snodgrass resort to the commercial room of the Peacock Inn, where "the atmosphere was redolent of tobacco-smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue to the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains which shaded the windows." Here, among others, were the dirty-faced man with a clay pipe, the very red-faced man behind a cigar, and the man with a black eye, who slowly filled a large Dutch pipe with most capacious bowl. Tupman and Snodgrass were of the company and smoked cigars. Sam Weller's father smoked his pipe philosophically. If Sam's "mother-in-law" "flies in a passion, and breaks his pipe, he steps out and gets another. Then she screams wery loud, and falls into 'sterics; and he smokes wery comfortably 'till she comes to agin." What better example could there be of pipe-engendered philosophy? When Mr. Pickwick and Sam look in at old Weller's house of call off Cheapside, they find the boxes full of stage coachmen, drinking and smoking, and among them is the old gentleman himself, "smoking with great vehemence." After having given his son valuable parental advice, "Mr. Weller, senior, refilled his pipe from a tin box he carried in his pocket, and, lighting his fresh pipe from the ashes of the old one, commenced smoking at a great rate."

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