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 9:

A few years earlier, in November 1825, Scott had written in his "Journal" that after dinner he usually smoked a couple of cigars which operated as a sedative—:

Just to drive the cold winter away,
And drown the fatigues of the day.

"I smoked a good deal," he continued, "about twenty years ago when at Ashestiel; but, coming down one morning to the parlour, I found, as the room was small and confined, that the smell was unpleasant, and laid aside the use of the Nicotian weed for many years; but was again led to use it by the example of my son, a hussar officer, and my son-in-law, an Oxford student. I could lay it aside to-morrow; I laugh at the dominion of custom in this and many things.

We make the giants first, and then do not kill them."

Scott's remark that Lockhart smoked when an Oxford student rather discredits Archdeacon's Denison's statement, quoted in the preceding chapter, that smoking was very generally unknown in Oxford in 1823-24. The archdeacon was writing from memory—a very untrustworthy recorder; Scott's remark was that of a contemporary.

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