Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 1:

There is little doubt that the smoke of herbs and leaves of various kinds was inhaled in this country, and in Europe generally, long before tobacco was ever heard of on this side the Atlantic. But whatever smoking of this kind took place was medicinal and not social. Many instances have been recorded of the finding of pipes resembling those used for tobacco-smoking in Elizabethan times, in positions and in circumstances which would seem to point to much greater antiquity of use than the form of the pipes supports; but some at least of these finds will not bear the interpretation which has been put upon them, and in other cases the presence of pipes could reasonably be accounted for otherwise than by associating them with the antiquity claimed for them.

In any case, the entire absence of any allusions whatever to smoking in any shape or form in our pre-Elizabethan literature, or in mediæval or earlier art, is sufficient proof that from the social point of view smoking did not then exist. The inhaling of the smoke of dried herbs for medicinal purposes, whether through a pipe-shaped funnel or otherwise, had nothing in it akin to the smoking of tobacco for both individual and social pleasure, and therefore lies outside the scope of this book.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

By 1830 smoking had so far "come in" again that a considerable proportion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers. Macaulay has drawn for us the not very attractive picture of the smoking-room of the old House of Commons—before the fire of 1834—in a letter to his sister dated in the summer of 1831. "I have left Sir Francis Burdett on his legs," he wrote, "and repaired to the smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen (tell it not to the West Indians), Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open, and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself." In July 1832 he again dated a letter to his sisters from the House of Commons smoking-room. "I am writing here," he says, "at eleven at night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres ... with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils.... Reject not my letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room—

The room,—but I think I'll describe it in rhyme,
That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime.
The smell of tobacco was always the same:
But the chloride was bought since the cholera came."

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