Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 2: An amusing example of the bragging "tobacconist" is pictured for us in Ben Jonson's "Bobadil." Bobadil may perhaps be somewhat of an exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from his pocket, declares that it is all that is left of seven pounds which he had bought only "yesterday was seven-night." A consumption of seven pounds of tobacco in eight days is a pretty "tall order"! Then he goes on to brag of its quality—your right Trinidado—and to assert that he had been in the Indies, where the herb grows, and where he himself and a dozen other gentlemen had for the space of one-and-twenty weeks known no other nutriment than the fume of tobacco. This again was tolerably "steep" even for this Falstaff-like braggart. He continues with more bombast in praise of the medicinal virtues of the herb—virtues which were then very firmly and widely believed in—and is replied to by Cob, the anti-tobacconist, who, with equal exaggeration on the other side, denounces tobacco, and declares that four people had died in one house from the use of it in the preceding week, and that one had "voided a bushel of soot"!
From Chapter 8: A satirical print by Rowlandson contains A Man of Fashion's Journal, dated May 1, 1802. The "man of fashion" rides and drinks, goes to the play, gambles and bets, but his journal contains no reference to smoking. Rowlandson himself smoked, and so did his brother caricaturist, Gillray. Angelo says that they would sometimes meet at such resorts of the "low" as the Bell, the Coal Hole, or the Coach and Horses, and would enter into the common chat of the room, smoke and drink together, and then "sometimes early, sometimes late, shake hands at the door—look up at the stars, say it is a pretty night, and depart, one for the Adelphi, the other to St. James's Street, each to his bachelor's bed." But outside the fashionable world pipes were still in full blast, and in many places of resort the atmosphere was as beclouded with tobacco-smoke as in earlier days. Grosley, in his "Tour to London," 1765, says that there were regular clubs, which were held in coffee-houses and taverns at fixed days and hours, when wine, beer, tea, pipes and tobacco helped to amuse the company.
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