Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

The growth of cigar-smoking was rapid. Mr. Steinmetz, in his book on "Tobacco," published in 1857, remarked that no way of using tobacco had made a more striking advance in England within the preceding twenty years than cigars. For a long time it had been confined in this country to the richer class of smokers, but when he wrote it was "in universal use." The wonder is that with so many men smoking cigars the old domestic and club restrictions, as pilloried in Thackeray's pages, were maintained so long. In 1853 Leech had an admirably drawn sketch in Punch of paterfamilias, in the absence of his wife, giving a little dinner. Beside him sits his small son, and on either side of the table sit two of his cronies. One has a cigar in his hand and is blowing a cloud of smoke, while the other is selecting a "weed." The host is just lighting his cigar as the maid enters with a tray of decanters and glasses, and with disgust written plainly on her face. The objectionable child beside him says—"Lor! Pa, are you going to smoke? My eye! won't you catch it when Ma comes home, for making the curtains smell!"

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 4:

There is a curious entry in Thomas Burton's diary of the proceedings of Cromwell's Parliament, which suggests that there may then have been the luxury of a members' smoking-room. Burton was a member of the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell from 1656 to 1659, and made a practice—for which historical students have been and are much his debtors—of taking notes of the debates as he sat in the House. Members sometimes objected to and protested against this note-taking, but Burton quietly went on using his pencil, and though his summaries of speeches are often difficult to follow, argument and sense suffering by compression, he has preserved much very valuable matter. Referring to a debate on January 7, 1656-57, on an attempt to go behind the previously passed Act of Oblivion, the diarist records that "Sir John Reynolds had numbered the House, and said at rising there were 220 at the least, besides tobacconists." This can only mean that there were at least 220 members actually present in the House when it rose, not counting the "tobacconists" or smokers, who were enjoying their pipes, not in the Chamber itself, but in some conveniently adjoining place, which may have been a room for the purpose, or may simply have been the lobby referred to above in the extract from "Mercurius Pragmaticus."

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