Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

In a private letter to me, which I am privileged to quote, Colonel Prideaux adds some further particulars as to the social attitude of early Victorian days towards tobacco—particulars which are the more valuable and interesting as being supplied from personal recollection of those now somewhat distant days. The Colonel writes: "When I was a young man people never thought of smoking in what house-agents call the 'reception-rooms,' the principal reason being that the occupation of these rooms was shared by ladies, and it was 'bad form' (not, by the way, a contemporary expression) to smoke while in the company of the fairer half of creation. Consequently, men had either to indulge in the practice out of doors, or else, as you say, sneak away to the kitchen when the servants had gone to bed, and puff up the chimney. It was only in large houses that a billiard room could be found, and even in a billiard room a pipe or cigar was taboo if ladies were present, while smoking-rooms could no more be found in middle-class houses than bath-rooms. Both cutties and churchwardens were smoked, but the latter of course were not adapted for persons engaged in active pursuits and were essentially of what I may call a sedentary nature. You could not even walk while holding a long churchwarden in your mouth, and consequently the short clay was most favoured by young men at Sandhurst and the Universities.... Labourers smoked short clays when out of doors, and churchwardens when they rested from their labours and took their ease in their inn in the evenings."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

The late Bishop Mandell Creighton, of London, was an incessant smoker of cigarettes. Mr. Herbert Paul, in his paper on the Bishop, says that those who went to see him at Fulham on a Sunday afternoon always found him, if they found him at all, "leisurely, chatty, hospitable, and apparently without a care in the world. There was the family tea-table, and there were the eternal cigarettes. The Bishop must have paid a fortune in tobacco-duty." There is a side view of another tobacco-lover in the "Note-Books" of Samuel Butler, the author of "Erewhon." Creighton, after reading Butler's "Alps and Sanctuaries" had asked the author to come and see him. Butler was in doubt whether or not to go, and consulted his clerk, Alfred, on the matter. That wise counsellor asked to look at the Bishop's letter, and then said: "I see, sir, there is a crumb of tobacco in it; I think you can go."

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