Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

The prejudice against the pipe is not confined to places of indoor resort. There are many men who smoke pipes within doors, who yet would not care to be seen in London smoking a pipe in the street, or in the park. In some circumstances this is quite intelligible. The writer of the Morning Post article remarked with much force and good sense that "Apart from social environment, there is a certain affinity between pipes and clothes. It is considered 'bad form' for a man in a frock-coat and silk hat to be seen smoking a pipe in the streets. If you are wearing a bowler hat and a lounge suit you may walk along with a briar protruding from your lips, and no one will think ill of you. If you are a son of toil garbed in your habit as you work, there is nothing incongruous in a well-seasoned clay or a 'nose-warmer,' which, for convenience, you carry upside down. Not so very long ago it was considered unseemly to smoke a pipe at all in the street unless you belonged to the humbler orders, who inhale their nicotine through the stem of a clay and expectorate with a greater sense of freedom than of responsibility."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

From the evidence so far adduced it may fairly be concluded, I think, that during the seventeenth century smoking was not fashionable, or indeed anything but rare, among the women of the more well-to-do classes, while among women of humbler rank it was an occasional, and in a few districts a fairly general habit.

The same conclusion holds good for the eighteenth century. Among women of the lowest class smoking was probably common enough. In Fielding's "Amelia," a woman of the lowest character is spoken of as "smoking tobacco, drinking punch, talking obscenely and swearing and cursing"—which accomplishments are all carefully noted, because none of them would be applicable to the ordinary respectable female.



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