Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

Throughout the eighteenth century the use of tobacco for smoking was largely confined to the middle and humbler classes of society. To smoke was characteristic of the "cit," of the country squire, of the clergy (especially of the country parsons), and of those of lower social status. But at the same time it must be borne in mind that then, as since, the dictates of fashion and the conventions of society were little regarded by many artists and men of letters.

In the preceding chapter I quoted from Addison's diary of a retired tradesman in the Spectator of 1712. The periodical publications of a generation or so later paid the great essayist the flattery of imitation in this respect as in others. In the Connoisseur of George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, for instance, there is, in 1754, the description of a citizen's Sunday. The good man, having sent his family to church in the morning, goes off himself to Mother Redcap's, a favourite tavern—suburban in those days—or house of call for City tradesmen. There he smokes half a pipe and drinks a pint of ale. In the evening at another tavern he smokes a pipe and drinks two pints of cider, winding up the inane day at his club, where he smokes three pipes before coming home at twelve to go to bed and sleep soundly.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Parr is reported to have once asked Lamb how he could smoke so much and so fast, and Lamb is said to have replied—"I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue." But if all accounts are true, Parr far outsmoked Lamb. If the essayist discontinued or modified his smoking habits, he made up for it by devotion to snuff—a devotion which his sister shared. A large snuff-box usually lay on the table between them, and they pushed it one to the other.

But it is time to return to the cigar, and the changing attitude of fashion towards smoking.

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