Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

Sometimes tobacco was used in church for disinfecting or deodorizing purposes. The churchwardens' accounts of St. Peter's, Barnstaple, for 1741 contain the entry: "Pd. for Tobacco and Frankincense burnt in the Church 2s. 6d." Sprigs of juniper, pitch, and "sweete wood," in combination with incense, were often used for the same purpose.

smoking, it may safely be asserted, was never practised commonly in English churches. Even in our own day people have been observed smoking—not during service time, but in passing through the building—in church in some of the South American States, and nearer home in Holland; but in England such desecration has been occasional only, and quite exceptional.

One need not be much surprised at any instance of lack of reverence in English churches during the eighteenth century, and a few instances can be given of church smoking in that era.

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The old Irishwomen who were once a familiar feature of London street-life as sellers of apples and other small wares at street corners, were often hardened smokers; and so were, and doubtless still are, many of the gipsy women who tramp the country. An old Seven Dials ballad has the following choice stanza-

When first I saw Miss Bailey,
'Twas on a Saturday,
At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,
And smoking a yard of clay.

Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign female smoking in the nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned. Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be whispered that here and there a lady-who was usually considered dreadfully "fast" for her pains-was accustomed to venture upon a cigarette.

In "Puck," 1870, Ouida represented one of her beautiful young men, Vy Bruce, as "murmuring idlest nonsense to Lilian Lee, as he lighted one of his cigarettes for her use"-but Lilian Lee was a cocotte.

Read More