Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

Says the Pipe to the Snuff-box, I can't understand
What the ladies and gentlemen see in your face,
That you are in fashion all over the land,
And I am so much fallen into disgrace.
- William Cowper.
(From a letter to the Rev. John Newton, May 28, 1782.)

"smoking has gone out," said Johnson in talk at St. Andrews, one day in 1773. "To be sure," he continued, "it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes and noses, and having the same thing done to us; yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out." Johnson did not trouble himself to think of how much the vagaries of fashion account for stranger vicissitudes in manners and customs than the rise and fall of the smoking-habit; nor did he probably foresee how slowly but surely the taste for smoking, even in the circles most influenced by fashion, would revive. Boswell tells us that although the sage himself never smoked, yet he had a high opinion of the practice as a sedative influence; and Hawkins heard him say on one occasion that insanity had grown more frequent since smoking had gone out of fashion, which shows that even Johnson could fall a victim to the post hoc propter hoc fallacy.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

Sir Roger de Coverley, as a typical country squire, was naturally a smoker. He presented his friend the Spectator, the silent gentleman, with a tobacco-stopper made by Will Wimble, telling him that Will had been busy all the early part of the winter in turning great quantities of them, and had made a present of one to every gentleman in the county who had good principles and smoked. When Sir Roger was driving in a hackney-coach he called upon the coachman to stop, and when the man came to the window asked him if he smoked. While Sir Roger's companion was wondering "what this would end in," the knight bid his Jehu to "stop by the way at any good Tobacconist's, and take in a Roll of their best Virginia." And when he visited Squire's near Gray's Inn Gate, his first act was to call for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a dish of coffee, a newspaper and a wax candle; and all the boys in the coffee-room ran to serve him. The wax candle was of course a convenience in matchless days for pipe-lighting. The "paper of tobacco" was the equivalent of what is now vulgarly called a "screw" of tobacco.

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