Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

George Fitz-Boodle recounts how, as a boy, he was flogged for smoking, and how, at Oxford, smoking among other villainies led to his rustication. Later his tobacco, combined with insolence to his tobacco-hating colonel, conducted him out of the army into the retirement of civil life; and so on and so on. There is, of course, an element of exaggeration in all this; but Mr. Fitz-Boodle's experiences and reflections throw much light on the social history of smoking in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Mr. Harry Furniss, in the preface to his edition of Thackeray, has an admirably terse and pertinent paragraph on this aspect of the "Fitz-Boodle Papers." He says—"No gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a 'weed' in the streets. Cigarettes were practically unheard of in England, and outside one's private smoking-room pipes were tabooed. Men in Society slunk into their smoking-rooms, or, when there was no smoking-room, into the kitchen or servants' hall, after the domestics had retired. A smoking-jacket was worn in the place of their ordinary evening coat, and their well-oiled, massive head of hair was protected by a gorgeously decorated smoking-cap. Thus the odour of tobacco was not brought into the drawing-room."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

Women smokers were not confined to any one class of society. The Rev. Giles Moore, Rector of Horsted Keynes, Sussex, made a note in his journal and account book in 1665 of "Tobacco for my wyfe, 3d." As from other entries in Mr. Moore's account book we know that two ounces cost him one shilling, we may wonder what Mrs. Moore was going to do with her half-ounce. There is no other reference to tobacco for her in the journal and account book. Possibly she was not a smoker at all, but needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose. There is ample evidence to show that in the seventeenth century extraordinary medicinal virtues continued to be attributed to the "divine weed."

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