Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Even so late as 1861 the attitude towards smoking was still much the same in some quarters. In that year a German scholar, Professor Franz von Holtzendorff, paid a visit to a country gentleman's house in Gloucestershire—Hardwicke Court. Later he printed an account of his experiences, a translation of which was published in this country in 1878. When the professor arrived, his host, the first greeting over, at once pointed out to him a secluded apartment—the one which he thought it most important for a German to know, namely, the smoking-room. "According to his idea," continued the professor, "every German has three national characteristics, smoking, singing, and Sabbath-breaking; the first and only idea in which I found him led astray by an abstract theory." Later, his hostess, explaining to him the method and routine of life in an English country-house, said that the ladies retired about eleven, while the gentlemen finished their day's work in the smoking-room—the secluded apartment—or enjoyed a cigar at the billiard-table; but a smoke in the billiard-room was only allowed if that room was not near the drawing-room or in the hall close by. "You must have often been surprised," she continued, "that we English ladies have such an invincible repugnance to tobacco smoke, but there is no dispensation from our rule of abstinence, except in those rooms which my husband has already pointed out to you."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

At si
Mundungus desit: tum non funcare recusant
Brown-Paper tostâ, vel quod fit arundine bed-mat.

Tobacco, in Queen Anne's time, still maintained its hold over large classes of the people, and was still dominant in most places of public resort; but there were signs of change in various directions as we have seen, and smoking had to a large extent ceased to be fashionable. Pepys has very few allusions to tobacco; Evelyn fewer still. There is little evidence as to whether or not the gallants of the Restoration Court smoked; but considering the foppery of their attire and manners, it seems almost certain that tobacco was not in favour among them. The beaux with their full wigs—they carried combs of ivory or tortoiseshell in their pockets with which they publicly combed their flowing locks—their dandy canes and scented, laced handkerchiefs, were not the men to enjoy the flavour of tobacco in a pipe. They were still tobacco-worshippers; but they did not smoke. The Indian weed retained its empire over the men (and women) of fashion by changing its form. The beaux were the devotees of snuff. The deftly handled pinch pleasantly titillated their nerves, and the dexterous use of the snuff-box, moreover, could also serve the purposes of vanity by displaying the beautiful whiteness of the hand, and the splendour of the rings upon the fingers. The curled darlings of the late seventeenth century and the "pretty fellows" of Queen Anne's time did not forswear tobacco, but they abjured smoking. Snuff-taking was universal in the fashionable world among both men and women; and the development of this habit made smoking unfashionable.

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