Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of three hundred years is complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking has never been so generally practised nor so smiled upon by fashion as it is at the present time. Men in their attitude towards tobacco have always been divisible into three classes—those who respected and followed and obeyed the conventions of society and the dictates of fashion, and smoked or did not smoke in accordance therewith; those who knew those conventions but disregarded them and smoked as and what they pleased; and those who neither knew nor cared whether such conventions existed, or what fashion might say, but smoked as and what, and when and where they pleased. At the present time the three classes tend to combine into one. There are, it is true, a few conventions and restrictions left; but they are not very strong, and will probably disappear one of these days. There is also, of course, and always has been, a fourth class of men, who for one reason or another, quite apart from what fashion may say or do, do not smoke at all.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

One of these old brass penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes was included in the exhibition of Welsh Antiquities held at Cardiff in the summer of 1913.

In the Colchester Museum is an automatic tobacco-box and till of japanned iron. On the lid of the box is painted a keg of tobacco and two clay pipes; and on that of the till the following doggerel lines:

A halfpeny dropt into the till,
Upsprings the lid and you may fill;
When you have filled, without delay,
Shut down the lid, or sixpence pay.

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