Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

In remote English and Welsh parishes men seem occasionally to have smoked in churches without any intention of being irreverent, and without any consciousness that they were doing anything unusual. Canon Atkinson, in his delightful book "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish," tells how, when he first went to Danby in Cleveland—then very remote from the great world—and had to take his first funeral, he found inside the church the parish clerk, who was also parish schoolmaster by the way, sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window with his hat on and comfortably smoking his pipe. A correspondent of the Times in 1895 mentioned that his mother had told him how she remembered seeing smoking in a Welsh church about 1850—"The Communion table stood in the aisle, and the farmers were in the habit of putting their hats upon it, and when the sermon began they lit their pipes and smoked, but without any idea of irreverence." In an Essex church about 1861, a visitor had pointed out to him various nooks in the gallery where short pipes were stowed away, which he was informed the old men smoked during service; and several of the pews in the body of the church contained triangular wooden spittoons filled with sawdust.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

The fashionable dislike of tobacco-smoke appears in the pages of another descriptive writer—the once well known N.P. Willis, the American author of many books of travel and gossip. In his "Pencillings by the Way," writing in July 1833, Willis describes the prevalence of smoking in Vienna among all the nationalities that thronged that cosmopolitan capital. "It is," he says, "like a fancy ball. Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians, Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and stinking costumes, promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest observation. Every third window is a pipe-shop, and they [presumably the pipes] show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of the passion. Some of them are marked '200 dollars.' The streets reek with tobacco-smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within the Glacis. Your hotel, your café, your coach, your friend, are all redolent of the same disgusting odour." In the following year, describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon's in Scotland, Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed up and "conversation assumed a merrier cast," then "coffee and liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more slowly," and at eleven o'clock there was a general move to the drawing-room. The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain from Willis's silence on the subject—the "disgusting odour" would surely have disturbed him—that no single member of the large dinner-party dreamed of smoking, or, at all events, attempted to smoke.

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