Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of three hundred years is complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking has never been so generally practised nor so smiled upon by fashion as it is at the present time. Men in their attitude towards tobacco have always been divisible into three classes—those who respected and followed and obeyed the conventions of society and the dictates of fashion, and smoked or did not smoke in accordance therewith; those who knew those conventions but disregarded them and smoked as and what they pleased; and those who neither knew nor cared whether such conventions existed, or what fashion might say, but smoked as and what, and when and where they pleased. At the present time the three classes tend to combine into one. There are, it is true, a few conventions and restrictions left; but they are not very strong, and will probably disappear one of these days. There is also, of course, and always has been, a fourth class of men, who for one reason or another, quite apart from what fashion may say or do, do not smoke at all.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

A curious feature of tobacco-manners among fashionable smokers of the period was the practice of passing a pipe from one to another, after the fashion of the "loving cup." There is a scene in "Greene's Tu Quoque," 1614, laid in a fashionable ordinary, where the London gallants meet as usual, and one says to a companion who is smoking: "Please you to impart your smoke?" "Very willingly, sir," says the smoker. Number two takes a whiff or two and courteously says: "In good faith, a pipe of excellent vapour!" The owner of the pipe then explains that it is "the best the house yields," whereupon the other immediately depreciates it, saying affectedly: "Had you it in the house? I thought it had been your own: 'tis not so good now as I took it for!" Another writer of this time speaks of one pipe of tobacco sufficing "three or four men at once."

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