Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

smokers of the period were often curious in tobacco-boxes. Mr. Richard Stapley, gentleman, of Twineham, Sussex, whose diary is full of curious information, was presented in 1691 by his friend Mr. John Hill with a "tobacco-box made of tortoise." Seven years earlier Stapley had sold to Hill his silver tobacco-box for 10s. in cash—the rest of the value of the box, he noted, "I freely forgave him for writing at our first commission for me, and for copying of answers and ye like in our law concerns; so yt I reckon I have as good as 30s. for my box: 5s. he gave me, and 5s. more he promised to pay me ... and I had his steel box with the bargain, and full of smoake." Apparently Mr. Hill's secretarial labours were valued at 20s. This same Sussex squire bought a pound of tobacco in December 1685 for 20d., which seems decidedly cheap, and in the following year a 5 lb. box for 7s. 6d.—which was cheaper still.

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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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