Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

The influence of the Court was wholly against smoking. Both Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort detested it, so tobacco was taboo wherever the Court was. The late Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived to see the new triumph of tobacco, said that she thought the greatest minor change in social habits which she had witnessed was that in the attitude assumed towards smoking, which, in her youth, "and even later, was, except in certain well-defined circumstances, regarded as little less than a heinous crime." Lady Dorothy remarked that "smoking-rooms in country houses were absolutely unknown"—but that was not quite correct as we shall see in the experiences of Professor von Holtzendorff, to be mentioned directly—and that "such gentlemen as wished to smoke after the ladies had gone to bed used, as a matter of course, to go either to the servants' hall or to the harness-room in the stables, where at night some sort of rough preparation was generally made for their accommodation.... Well do I remember the immense care which devotees of tobacco used to take, when sallying forth in the country to enjoy it, not to allow the faintest whiff of smoke to penetrate into the hall as they lit their cigars at the door."

In 1845 Dickens wrote: "I generally take a cigar after dinner when I'm alone." The reservation in the last three words may be noted. In the "Book of Snobs," Major Wellesley Ponto goes to smoke a cigar in the stables—Ponto had no smoking-room—with Lord Gules, who is described as a "very young, short, sandy-haired and tobacco-smoking nobleman, who cannot have left the nursery very long." Later, Ponto and Gules "resume smoking operations ... in the now vacant kitchen."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

Laurence Oliphant, who was both a man of letters and a man of fashion, is generally credited with the introduction into English society of the cigarette; but it is difficult to suggest even an approximate date. Writing from Boulogne to W.H. Wills in September 1854, Dickens says, "I have nearly exhausted the cigarettes I brought here," and proceeds to give directions for some to be sent to him from London. This is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette-smoking in England; but it is possible that by "cigarettes" Dickens meant not what we now know as such, but simply small cigars. Mr. H.M. Hyndman, in his "Record of an Adventurous Life," says that when he was living as a pupil, about the year 1860, with the Rector of Oxburgh, his fellow-pupils included "Edward Abbott of Salonica, who, poor fellow, was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings at the beginning of the Turco-Servian War. Cigarette-smoking, now so popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself, was the first devotee of this habit I encountered."

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