Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Some men seem to act upon Mark Twain's principle of never smoking when asleep or at meals, and never refraining at any other time. But excess is self-condemned. There is no good reason why anyone, for social or any other reasons, should look askance at the reasonable use of tobacco. "But used in moderation, what evils, let me ask,"—I again quote Dr. Andrew Wilson's calm good sense—"are to be found in the train of the tobacco-habit! A man doesn't get delirium tremens even if he smokes more than is good for him; he doesn't become a debased mortal; there is nothing about tobacco which makes a man beat his wife or assault his mother-in-law—rather the reverse, in fact, for tobacco is a soother and a quietener of the passions, and many a man, I daresay, has been prevented from doing rash things in the way of retaliation, when he has lit his pipe and had a good think over his affairs. Whenever anybody counterblasts to-day against tobacco, I feel as did my old friend Wilkie Collins, when somebody told him that to smoke was a wrong thing. 'My dear sir,' said the great novelist, 'all your objections to tobacco only increase the relish with which I look forward to my next cigar!'"

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

One of the earliest cigar-smokers must have been that remarkable clergyman, the Rev. Charles Caleb Colton, whose "Lacon," published in 1820, was once popular. Colton was in succession Rector of Tiverton and Vicar of Kew, but on leaving Kew became a wine-merchant in Soho. While at Kew he is said to have kept cigars under the pulpit, where, he said, the temperature was exactly right.

At first even cigar-smoking was confined to comparatively few persons, and the social prejudice against tobacco continued unabated. Thackeray significantly makes Rawdon Crawley a smoker—the action of "Vanity Fair" takes place in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The original smoking-room of the Athenæum Club, which was founded in 1824, the present building being erected in 1830, was a miserable little room, Dr. Hawtree, on behalf of the committee, announcing that "no gentleman smoked." The Oriental Club, when built in 1826-27, contained no smoking-room at all.

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