Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Another correspondent of the same journal, Colonel W.F. Prideaux, also replying to a query of mine, wrote: "Before briar-root pipes came into common use clay pipes were of necessity smoked by all classes. When I matriculated at Oxford at the Easter of 1858 ... University men used to be rather particular about the pipes they smoked. The finest were made in France, and the favourite brand was 'Fiolet, Saint Omer.' I do not know if this kind is still smoked, but it was made of a soft clay that easily coloured. In taverns, of course, the churchwarden—beloved of Carlyle and Tennyson—was usually smoked to the accompaniment of shandygaff. At Simpson's fish ordinary at Billingsgate these pipes were always placed on the table after dinner, together with screws of shag tobacco, and a smoking parliament moistened with hot or cold punch according to the season, was generally held during the following hour. Of course, in those days no one ever thought of smoking a pipe in the presence of ladies."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about smoking at this period, from the social point of view, was its fashionableness. One of the marked characteristics of the gallant—the beau or dandy or "swell" of the time—was his devotion to tobacco. Earle says that a gallant was one that was born and shaped for his clothes—but clothes were only a part of his equipment. Bishop Hall, satirizing the young man of fashion in 1597, describes the delicacies with which he was accustomed to indulge his appetite, and adds that, having eaten, he "Quaffs a whole tunnel of tobacco smoke"; and old Robert Burton, in satirically enumerating the accomplishments of "a complete, a well-qualified gentleman," names to "take tobacco with a grace," with hawking, riding, hunting, card-playing, dicing and the like. The qualifications for a gallant were described by another writer in 1603 as "to make good faces, to take Tobacco well, to spit well, to laugh like a waiting gentlewoman, to lie well, to blush for nothing, to looke big upon little fellowes, to scoffe with a grace ... and, for a neede, to ride prettie and well."

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