Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Kingsley's devotion to smoke seems to have surprised Tennyson, who was no light smoker himself. The most curious story illustrating Kingsley's love of tobacco is that told in the life of Archbishop Benson by his son, Mr. A.C. Benson. One day about the year 1860, the future archbishop was walking with the Rector of Eversley in a remote part of the parish, on a common, when Kingsley suddenly said—"I must smoke a pipe," and forthwith went to a furze-bush and felt about in it for a time. Presently he produced a clay churchwarden pipe, "which he lighted, and solemnly smoked as he walked, putting it when he had done into a hole among some tree roots, and telling my father that he had a cache of pipes in several places in the parish to meet the exigencies of a sudden desire for tobacco." If this story did not appear in the life of an archbishop, some scepticism on the part of the reader might be excused.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The fine lady disliked tobacco. The author of "A Pipe of tobacco," in Dodsley's well-known "Collection," to which reference has already been made, wrote:

Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon;
They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.
* * * * * * *
Citronia vows it has an odious stink;
She will not smoke (ye gods!)-but she will drink;
and the same writer describes tobacco as "By ladies hated, hated by the beaux." Although the fine lady may have affected to swoon at the sight of pipes, and belles generally, like the beaux, may have disdained tobacco as vulgar, yet there were doubtless still to be found here and there respectable women who occasionally indulged in a smoke. In an early Spectator, Addison gives the rules of a "Twopenny Club, erected in this Place, for the Preservation of Friendship and good Neighbourhood," which met in a little ale-house and was frequented by artisans and mechanics. Rule II was, "Every member shall fill his pipe out of his own box"; and Rule VII was, "If any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or smokes."

In one of the valuable volumes issued by the Georgian Society of Dublin a year or two ago, Dr. Mahaffy, writing on the mid-eighteenth century society of the Irish capital, quotes an advertisement by a Dublin tobacconist of "mild pigtail for ladies" which suggests the alarming question-Did Irish ladies chew?

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