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."

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

The figure was usually made with a snuff mull in his hand-the highlander being always credited with a great love and a great capacity for snuff-taking. But one curious example was furnished, not only with a mull but with a bat-like implement of unknown use. Mr. Arthur Denman, F.S.A., writing in Notes and Queries, April 17, 1909, said: "I have a very neat little, genuine specimen of the old tobacconist's sign of a 42nd Highlander with his 'mull.' It is 3 ft. 6 in. high, and it differs from those usually met with in that under the left arm is an implement almost exactly like a cricket-bat. This bat has a gilt knob to the handle, and on the shoulder of it are three chevrons in gold, without doubt a sergeant's stripes. On the exposed side of the bat is what would appear to represent a loose strip of wood. This strip is nearly one-third of the width of the instrument, and extends up the middle about two-fifths of the length of the body of it. I can only guess that the bat was, at some time, primarily, an emblem of a sergeant's office, and, secondarily, used for the infliction of chastisement on clumsy or disorderly recruits; and perhaps it was equivalent to the Prügel of German armies, with which sergeants drove lagging warriors into the fray. But is there any record of such an accoutrement as being that of a sergeant in the British army? and what was the purpose of the loose strip, unless it was to cause the blow administered to resound as much as to hurt, as does the wand of Harlequin in a booth."

Read More