 CHAPTER IX SIGNS OF REVIVAL Some sigh for this and that. My wishes don't go far. The world may wag it will, so I have my cigar, Thomas Hood. The revival of smoking among those who were most amiable to the dictates of fashion, and among whom consequently tobacco had long been in bad o' door, came by way of the cigar. In the preceding chapters all the references to and illustrations of smoking have been concerned with pipes. Until the early years of the nineteenth century, the use of cigars was practically unknown in this country. Thorliest notices of cigars in English books occur in accounts of travel in Spain and Portugal, and in the Spanish colonies, and in such notices the phonetic spelling of cigar often occurs. A few folks still cling to this spelling. There was a cigar shop in the Strand till quite recently, and I saw the notice cigars the other day over a small tobacco shop in York, which has no authority, and on etymological grounds is indefensible. The derivation of cigar is not altogether clear. But the probabilities are strongly in favor of its connection with Cigar, the Spanish name for cicada, the shrilly, chirping insect, familiar in the southern countries of Europe, and the subject of frequent allusions by the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, as well as by modern scribes. A Spanish lexical grapher of authority says that the cigar has the form of a cicada, of paper, and on the whole. It is highly probable that the likeness of the role of tobacco leaf was the reason that the cigarot was so called. There is no warrant of any kind for cigar. The earliest mention of cigars in English occurs in a book dated 1735. A traveler in Spanish America named Cockburn, whose narrative was published in that year describes how he met three friars at Nicaragua, who, he says, gave us some cigars to smoke. These are leaves of tobacco rolled up in such a manner that they serve both for a pipe and tobacco itself. They know no other way here, for there is no such thing as a tobacco pipe. Throughout New Spain, sheroots seem to have been known somewhat earlier. The earliest mention of them is dated about 1670. Sir James Murray, in the Great Oxford Dictionary, gives the following interesting extract from an unpublished MS relating to India, written between 1669 and 1679. The poor sort of inhabitants, vits yet generous, Malabars, etc., smoke their tobacco after a very mean, but I judge original manner. Only a leaf rolled up and light one end, holding the other between the lips. This is called a bunco, and by a Portugal's a chibruta. The condemnation of cheroot or cigar making as a mean method of making tobacco has an odd look in the light of modern habits and customs. The use of cigars in this country began to come in early in the last century, and by at least 1830 they were being freely if privately smoked. It is probable that the reduction of the duty on cigars from 18s to 9s pound to pound, the reduction of duty on cigars from 18 shillings to 9 shillings a pound, in 1829 had its effect in making cigars more popular. Crocher in 1831, commenting on Johnson's saying that smoking had gone out, said, the taste for smoking, however, has revived probably from the military habits of Europe during the French wars, but instead of the sober sedentary pipe, the ambulatory cigar is chiefly used. Crocher's shrewd suggestion was probably not far wide of the truth. It is likely, if not highly probable. That revival of smoking in the shape of the cigar was directly connected with the experiences of British officers in Spain and Portugal during the penitent war. One of the earliest cigar smokers must have been that remarkable clergyman, the Reverend Charles Caleb Colton, whose lecon published in 1820 was much popular. Colton was in succession rector of Tiberon and victor of Coup, and on leaving Coup became a wine merchant in Soho. While at Coup, he is said to have kept cigars under the pulpit, where he said the temperature was exactly right. At first even cigar smoking was confined to comparatively few persons, and the social prejudice against tobacco continued unabated. Thackeray, significant, makes Rondon, growly a smoker. The action of vanity fair takes place in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The original smoking room of the Athian Club, which was founded in 1824, the present building being erected in 1830, was a miserable little room, Dr. Houtrion, of the committee announcing that no gentleman smoked. The Oriental Club, when built in 1826-27, contained no smoking room at all. Sir Walter Scott often smoked cigars, though he seems to have regarded it in the light of an indulgence to be half-apologised for. In his journal, July 4th, 1829, he noted, When I had finished my bit of dinner and there was a quiet way smoking my cigar over a glass of Nagos, Adam Ferguson comes in with a summons to attend to the Justice Clerks, where it seems I was engaged. I was totally out of case to attend to his summons, redolent as I was of tobacco, but I am vexed at the circumstance. It looks careless and what is worse affected, and the Justice is an old friend moreover. Tobacco in any form was suspect, a man might smoke a cigar, but he must not take the odor into the drawing-room, or even an old friend. A few years earlier, November of 1825, Scott had written in his journal that after dinner he usually smoked a couple of cigars, which operated as a sedative, just to drive the cold winter away and drown the fatigues of the day. I smoked a good deal, he continued, about twenty years ago when at Ashenteele, but coming down one morning to the parlour I found as the room was smell and confined that the smell was unpleasant, and ladies aside the use of nicotine weed for many years, but was again led to use it by the example of my son, a Husser officer, and my son-in-law, an Oxford student. I could lay aside tomorrow, I laugh at the dominion of custom, in this and many things. We make the giants first, and then do not kill them. Scott remarked that Lackart smoked when an Oxford student, rather discredits anchored Ains Denison's statement, quoted in the preceding chapter that smoking was very generally known in Oxford in 1823 to 24. The Archedekin was writing from memory a very untrustworthy recorder. Scott's remark was that of a contemporary. Byron is reputed to have been another cigar smoker. His apostrophe to tobacco in the island, 1832, a poem founded in part on the history of the mutiny of the bounty, is familiar. The lines are indeed almost the only familiar passage in that poem. Sublime tobacco, which from east to west, cheers the tar's labour or the Turkman's rest, which on the Moslem's Ottoman divide his hours. Hadn't rival's opium and his brides magnificent in Istanbul but less grand, though not less loved in whopping or the strand. Divine and hookah's glorious in a pipe, when tipped with amber, mellow, rich and ripe, like other charmers wooing the caress, more dazzlingly when daring in full dress. Yet thy true lovers more admire, by far thy naked beauties. Give me my cigar. How far these lines really represent the poet's own sentiments, and rather he habitually smoked either cigar or pipe is another matter. Other mental letters of the time were zealous endurance of the pipe. One of these was the poet Campbell from 1820 to 1830. He was the editor of the new monthly magazine, and is reputed to have been so unbusinesslike in his methods, that there was always difficulty in getting proofs corrected and returned in good time. On one occasion, as reported by a member of the firm that printed the magazine, a proof had been lost, and the poet was informed that the article must go to press the next day uncorrected. Campbell said word that he would look in on the morning and corrected. Preparations were duly made to receive him. He was shown into the best room and left with the proof on his table. After a while he rang the bell and said, I could do this much better if I had a pipe. Thereupon pipe and tobacco were procured and taken into him. Campbell tore open the paper containing the tobacco and, with a slightly contemptuous expression, exclaimed, eh, canaster! I'd rather I had been shag. Charles Lamb was a heavy pipe-smoker. He smoked too much, regretted it, but continued to smoke, not wisely but too well. He came home very smoky and drinky last night, as his sister of him. When sending some books to Coleridge at Keswick in November 1802, Lamb wrote, If you find the Milton's, in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right-bloster, blacked in the candle, my usual supper, or, pre-adventure, a stray ash of tobacco waved into those crevices, look to that passage more especially. Depend upon it. It contains good matter. Lamb a book read best over a pipe. The following year he wrote to Coleridge, What do you think of smoking? I want your sober, average, noon opinion of it. Generally I'm eating my dinner about the time I should terminate. Morning is a girl and can't smoke. She's no evidence one or the other, and night is so evidently brought over. He can't be a very upright judge. Maybe the truth is the one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome, and that's the sum of it. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason. After all, our instincts may be best. It is clear from one or two references that Lamb and Coleridge had been accustomed to smoke together after meetings and early days at this salutation and cat, with less disastrous results to Coleridge. It is to be hoped then those which followed his Birmingham smoke as set forth in the preceding chapter. In 1805 Lamb wrote to Wadsworth, Now I have bid farewell to my sweet enemy tobacco, I shall perhaps set nobly to work. Fourth with, he set to work on the farce, Mr. H., which some months later was produced at Drury Lane and was promptly damned. After its failure Lamb wrote to Halsey. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces. But Lamb and his pipe were not to be parted, by even repeated resolutions of leaving off smoking. It was years after this that he met Merfredi at Tarlefords, and by way probably of saying something to shock Mark O'Ready, whose personality could hardly have been sympathetic to him, uttered the remarkable wish that the last breath he drew in might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pond. It was in 1818 that Lamb published the collection of his writings in two volumes, which contained the well-known Farewell to Tobacco, written in 1805 and referred to in letter of that year to Wadsworth, quoted above, Its phrases of mingled abuse and affection are familiar to lovers of Lamb. Par is reported to have once asked Lamb how he could smoke so much and so fast, and Lamb is said to have replied, I toil after, sir, as some men toil after virtue. But if all accounts are true, Par far outsmoked Lamb. If the essayist discontinued or modified his smoking habits, he made up for it by a devotion to snuff, a devotion which his sister shared. A large snuff box usually lay on the table between them, and they pushed it one to the other. But it is time to return to the cigar and the changing attitude of fashion toward smoking. There would appear to have been some smokers who disliked the new-fangled cigars. Angelo seems from various passages in his remembrances to have been a smoker and to have been very frequently in the company of smokers, yet he could write, there are few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that we are again in England than the superiority of our stagecoaches. There is something very exhilarating and being carried through the air with rapidity, considering the rate at which stagecoaches now travel, i.e. just before 1830. A place on the box or front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat, but alas, no human enjoyment is free from alloy. A jupeheadler or merchant foreigner with his cigar in his mouth has it in his power to turn the draft of sweet air up into a cup of bitterness. Perhaps Angelo's objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by a jupeheadler or merchant foreigner than to the cigar itself. But going on to describe the journey to Hastings, sitting on the roof in front, beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment of dashing along, anteced, and just going merry on. We had the annoyance of a coxcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air which heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar, which looks as if his real objection was to cigars as such. 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 Pentrelings on 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, Karats, Walchins, Jews, Maldovians, Greeks, Turks, all dressed up in their national and stinking costumes, promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest observation. The third window is a pipe shop, and they presumably the pipes show by their splendor and variety the expressiveness of the passion. Some of them are marked two hundred dollars. The streets reek with tobacco smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within the galax. Your hotel, your café, your coach, your friend, are all redolent of the same disgusting odor. In the following year, describing a large dinner party at the Duke of Gordon in Scotland, Willis says that, when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed up in 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 odor would surely have disturbed him, that no single member of the large dinner party dreamed of smoking or, at all, events attempted to smoke. By eighteen thirty, smoking had so far come in, again, that a considerable portion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers. Mackley has drawn for us a not very attractive picture of the smoking room of the old House of Commons before the fire of eighteen thirty-four. In a letter to his sister dated in the summer of eighteen thirty-one, I have left Sir Francis Burdette on his legs, he wrote, and repaired to the smoking room, a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place with tables covered with green bays and writing materials. On a full night it is generally throng towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen, tell it not to the West Indians, boxing, blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open, and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself. In July, eighteen thirty-two, he began, dated a letter to his sister from the House of Commons smoking room. I am writing here, he says, at eleven at night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres, with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils. Reject not my letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail. For this is the room. But I think I'll describe it in rhyme. That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime. The smell of tobacco was always the same, but the chloride has bought, since the Chlora came. The mention of pigtail shows that the house contained pipe, as well as cigar smokers. A few days later he wrote again to his sisters, but this time, from the library, where he says, we are in a far better atmosphere than in the smoking room. Wents, I wrote you last week. One wonders why Maculay, who apparently did not smoke himself, and who, though somewhat more tolerant of tobacco than his father, Zachary Maculay, evidently did not like the atmosphere of the smoking room. Chose to write there, when the library, where he must surely have felt more at home, was available. Among other well- know men of standing and fashion who were smokers, about this period may be named Lord Eldon Lord Stowell, Brom Lord Cout and H.R.H. The Duke of Sussex. In Thackery's book The Snobbs, Miss Wirt, the governess at Major Apontos, refers in shocked tones to H.R.H. The poor dear Duke of Sussex, such a man, my dears, but alas, addicted to smoking. And to say the royal duke was not content with the cigar that it was becoming fashionable, but actually smoked a pipe. Mrs. Sterling, in the letter bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer Stanhope, 1913, notes that Lord Ulthrup was a frequent visitor about 1822 at Holcomb, the well-known seat of Mr. Koch of Norfolk, later Lord Lycaster. And that on such occasion he enjoyed the distinction of being the only guest besides the Duke of Sussex, whoever indulged in the rare habit of smoking. But while the royal duke was wont to puff away at a long murchime in his bedroom till he actually blinded himself, and all who came near him, Fidel Jack, Lord Anthrop's nickname, behaved in more considerate fashion, only smoking out of doors as he passed restlessly up and down the grass terrace. With the revival of smoking, things changed at Holcomb on Christmas Day, 1847, Lady Elizabeth writing to her husband from Holcomb, the Homer for Childhood remark, the billiard table is always lighted up for the gentlemen when they come from shooting, and there they sit, smoking. The growing popularity of the cigar made smoking less unfashionable than it had been among the upper classes of society, but among humbler folk pipe smoking had never gone out. Every public house did its regular trading clays known as Church Wardens and Brossolais, and by other names either of familiarity or descriptive of the place of manufacture. And on a mantelpiece or table of inn, or alehouse stood the tobacco box. Miss Jekyll, in her delightful book, Old West Surrey, figures an example of these old public house tobacco boxes, which is made of lead. It has bosses of lion's heads at the hins and a portrait in relief on the front of the Duke of Wellington in his plumed cocked hat. Inside, there is a flat piece of sheet lead with a knob to keep the tobacco pressed close so that it may not dry up. A curious and popular variety of tobacco box, often to be found in rural inns and alehouses, was made somewhat on the principle of the now everywhere familiar automatic machines. The late Mr. Frederick Gale, in a column of tobacco reminiscences, which he contributed to the Globe newspaper in 1899, said that at village outdoor festivals of the thirties and early forties, respectable elderly farmers and tradesmen would sit round a table on which was an automatic square brass tobacco box of large dimensions into which the smokers dropped a half penny, and the lid flew back, and the public entrusted the smokers honor to fill his pipe and close the box. When the pipes were filled, they were lighted by means of a tinder box and flint, and a stable lantern supplied by the ulster. A penny would appear to have been a more usual charge for a frequent inscription on the lid was, the custom is, before you fill, to put a penny in the till. When you have filled without delay, close the lid or six pence pay. One of these old brass penny in the slot tobacco boxes was included in the exhibition of Welsh antiquities held at Cardiff in the summer of 1913. On the Closter Museum is an automatic tobacco box and till of Japan iron. On the lid of the box is painted a keg of tobacco and two clay pipes, and a night of the till, the following dog row lines. A half penny dropped into the till, up springs the lid, and you may fill. When you have filled without delay, shut down the lid or six pence pay. A correspondent of notes and queries in 1908 mentioned that he possessed two of these old penny in the slot tobacco boxes, and had come cross another in a dealer shop of a somewhat peculiar make about which he wished to get information. But differs from any I have previously seen in this respect, that it works with a six pence and not a penny or half penny. It is ingrained with the usual lines except that the user is asked to put six pence in the till and then to shut down the lid under penalty of a fine of a shilling. What could it have been used for that was worth six pence at a time? Other uncommon features are that the money portion is shallow and that the part of the tobacco extends the whole length of the box. I should say that the box is much smaller than any others I have ever seen. No information as to the use of this curious box was forthcoming from any of the learned and ingenious correspondence of notes and queries, and a problem which they cannot solve may not unreasonably regarded as insoluble. Readers of Dickens are familiar with the drawing by Curick Schenck which illustrates the chapter on Scotland Yard in Dickens' Sketches by Bos, which was written before 1836. It shows the coal heavers, sitting round the fire, shouting out some sturdy chorus and smoking long clays. Here, wrote Dickens, in a dark, wainscoted room of ancient appearance, cheered by the glow of a mighty fire, sat the lusty coal heavers, quaffing large drots of Barclay's vest, and puffing forth volumes of smoke, with wreaths heavily above their heads, and involved the room in a thick, dark cloud. These good folk and others of their kin had never been affected by any change of fashion in respect to smoking. In another of the sketches, the amusing tugs at Rumsgate, when poor, chiming tugs is hid behind the curtain, half dead with fear. He hears Captain Wander's call for brandy and cigars. The cigars were introduced. The Captain was a professed smoker. So was the Lieutenant. So was Joseph Tugs, poor chiming. On the other hand was one of those who could smoke without feeling it indispensably necessary to retire. Immediately and never could smell smoke without a strong disposition to cough. Consequently, as the apartment was small the door closed and the smoke powerful. Poor chiming was soon compelled to cough, which precipitated the catastrophe. It is noticeable that Dickens speaks of the three worthies as professed smokers. A remark would suggest that such daredevil men, who would take cigars as a matter of course and for enjoyment, and not merely out of a complementary acquiescence in someone else's wish, were comparatively rare. Other illustrations of folk who smoked, not cigars, but pipes, may be drawn from Pickwick, which was published in 1836. At the very beginning Mr. Pickwick calls a cab at St. Martin's El Grande. The first cab is fetched from the public house, where he had been smoking his first pipe. At Rochester Mr. Pickwick makes notes on the four towns of Stood, Rochester, Cartham, and Brompton, where the military were present in strength, and hence the observant gentlemen noted, the consumption of tobacco in these towns must be very great, and the smell, which pervades the streets, must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking. On the evening of the election at Eastern Whirl, Tubman and Snodgrass resort to the commercial room of the Peacock Inn, where the atmosphere was redland of tobacco smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue to the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains, which shaded the windows, here, among others, were the dirty faced men with a clay pipe, and the very red-faced man behind a cigar, and the man with a black eye, who slowly filled a large dutch pipe with the most capricious bowl. Tubman and Snodgrass were of the company and smoked cigars. Samuel's father smoked his pipe philosophically. If Sam's mother-in-law flies in a passion and breaks his pipe, he steps out and gets another. Then she screams wary loud and fills into sterics, and he smokes very comfortably, till she comes to again. What better example could there be of pipe-endangered philosophy? When Mr. Pickwick and Sam look in at Old Weller's house of call, off Cheapside, they find the boxes full of stagecoachmen drinking and smoking, and among them is the old gentleman himself smoking with great vehemence. After having given his son valuable parental advice, Mr. Weller Sr. refilled his pipe from the tin box. He carried in his pocket, and lighting his fresh pipe from the ashes of the old one commenced smoking at a great rate. A little later, when Mr. Pickwick hunts up Perker's clerk loadman and opens the jovial circle at the magpie and stump, he finds on his right hand a gentleman in a checkered shirt and mosaic studs with a cigar in his mouth, who expresses the hopes that the newcomer does not find this sort of thing disagreeable. Not at least, replied Mr. Pickwick. I like it very much, although I am not a smoker myself. I should be very sorry to say I wasn't. Interposes another gentleman on the opposite side of the table. It's bored and lodging to me is smoke. Mr. Pickwick glances at the speaker and thinks that if it were washing too, it would be all the better. Later again, when the couple of saw-bones, the medical students Ben, Allen, and Bob Sawyer, make their first appearance on the scene, they are, discovered in the morning, seated by Mr. Wattacky's kitchen fire, smoking cigars, and it is significant of how smoking out of doors was then regarded that Dickens, going on to describe Sawyer in detail, refers to that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description. Apparently in 1836 the only person who would allow himself to be seen smoking in the street was of the kind naturally inclined to do other objectionable things mentioned. The same idea runs through the allusions to tobacco in Pickwick. Smoking was undeniably vulgar. Mr. John Smucker, who introduces Sam Wheeler at the friendly swary of the Bath Footman, smokes a cigar through an amber tube. Cigar holders were a novelty. When Mr. Pickwick is taken to the house of Namby, the Sheriff's Officer, the principal features of the front parlor house are fresh sand and stale tobacco smoke. One of the occupants of the room is a mere boy of nineteen or twenty, who though it was yet barely ten o'clock, was drinking gin and water and smoking a cigar, amusements to which, judging from his inflamed continents, he had devoted himself pretty constantly to, for the last year or two, of his life. Tobacco smoke pervades the Fleet Prison. In fact, to trace tobacco through the pages of Pickwick is to realize vividly how vulgar, if not vicious, an accomplishment smoking was considered by the fashionable world and how popular it was among the nobodies of the unfashionable world. Similar morals may be drawn from other works of fiction. The action of the first chapter of Taqueries, Penderelinus, passes early in the nineteenth century. In the third chapter, Folker has a cigar in his mouth as he strolls with Pen down the high street of Chatteris, old Dr. Portman, meets them in regards with wonder Pen's friend, from whose mouth and cigar clouds up fragrance issued, which curled around the doctor's honest face and shoveled hat. An old school fellow of mine, Mr. Folker, said Pen, the doctor said, mm, and scowled at the cigar. He did not mind a pipe in his study, but the cigar was an abomination to the worthy gentleman. The Reverend gentleman in liking his pipe was faithful to the traditional fondness for smoking of Parsons, but smoking must be in the study. To smoke on the street was vulgar, and to smoke the new-fangled cigar was worse. Peninus, when he comes home the first time from Oxbridge, brings with him a large box of cigars of strange brand, which he smokes, not only about the stables and greenhouses where they are good, for his mother's plants and which were obviously places to which a man who wished to smoke should be take himself, but in his own study which rather shocks his mother. Pen goes from bad to worse during his university days, and, sad to say, one Sunday, in the last long vacation the wretched boy, instead of going to church, was seen at the gate of the clattering arm smoking a cigar, in the face of the congregation as it issued from St. Mary's. There was an awful sensation in the village society. Portman prophesied Pen's ruin after that, and groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal. Later, the smoke from Warrington's short pipe and Pen's cigars floats through many pages of the novel. End of chapter 9 Chapter 10 of the Social History of Smoking This is LibriVox Recording. I'll LibriVox Recording in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Jeff. The Social History of Smoking by J. L. Apperson I. S. O. Chapter 10 Early Victorian Days Seen to match thigh-rich perfume, can make ardenier persume, through her coined alambic string, non-so-sovereign to the brain, lamb, a farewell to tobacco. The social attitude toward smoking in early Victorian days and for some time later was curious. The development of cigar smoking among those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished and the natural consequence spread downwards of the use of cigars. In accordance with the invariable love of fashion, together with the continual devotion to the pipe, among those whose love of tobacco had never slackened, may smoking a much more general practice than it had been for some generations. It is some who are significant that deacons in the old curiosity shop, 1840, made that repulsive dwarf, Huop, smoke cigars. When the little monster comes home inspectly in the fourth chapter of the book and breaks up his wife's tea party, he settles himself in an armchair with his large head and face squeezed up against the back and his little legs planted on the table. With a case bottle of rum, cold water, and a box of cigars before him. Now, Mrs. Kuop, he says, I feel in a smoking humor and shall probably blaze away all night. But sit where you are, if you please. In case I want you, Kuop smokes cigars one after the other. His rash the wife sitting patiently by, from sunset till sometime after daybreak. The dwarf's taste, however, were catholic. A little later in the book, the reader finds him. When encamped in the back pallor of the old man's shop, smoking pipe after pipe and competing with the Naevis attorney, Samson Brass to do the same. Tobacco smoke always causes Brass a great internal discomposure and annoyance, but this may no difference to Kuop, who insists on his friend continuing to smoke while he inquires. Is it good breath? Is it nice? Is it fragrant? Do you feel like the Grand Turk? But Kuop and Brass were not in society. Notwithstanding that the number of smokers had so largely increased and was continually increasing, smoking was regarded socially as something of a vice to be practiced in inconvenient places and not too publicly. There were still plenty of active opponents and denouncers of tobacco. One of the most distinguished was the Great Duke of Wellington, who abominates smoking and was annoyed by the increase of cigar smoking among officers of the army. In the early 40s, he issued a general order number 577, which contained a paragraph that would have delighted the heart of King James I. It runs thus, the commander-in-chief had been informed that the practice of smoking by the use of pipes, cigars, or churros have become prevalent among officers of the army, which is not only in itself a species of intoxication occasioned by the fumes of tobacco, but undoubtedly occasions drinking and tippling by those who acquire the habits. And he entrenched the officers commanding regiments to prevent smoking in the master room of their several regiments and in the adjoining department and to discourage the practice among the officers of junior rank in their regiments. The Duke's prejudice was stronger than his facts. The statement not very grammatically expressed that the practice of smoking was itself a species of intoxication was absurd enough, but the allegation introduced by a question begging undoubtedly that smoking occasion drinking was directly contrary to the facts. It was the introduction of after-dinner drinking that largely helped to cure the bad old practice of continued after-dinner drinking. Perhaps the best reflection of a comment upon the attitude of social toward smoking is to be found in the ironical, satirical pages of Thackery, that the reader turned to the confessions of George Fitzboodle as choir, the Fitzboodle Papers. First appeared in Frieza's magazine for 1842, and he will find how smoking was regarded at that date, and what Thackery, speaking through the puppet Fitzboodle, thought of it. George starts by saying, I am now in the first place what is called a ladies man, having contracted an irrepressible habit of smoking after-dinner, which has obliged me to give up a great deal of the dear creature's society, nor can I go much to the country houses for the same reason. The ladies had a keen sense for the abominable outdoor of tobacco, and distressed the man who smoked. Here is Fitzboodle's, where Thackery's comment on it. What is this smoking that it should be considered a crime? I believe in my heart that women are jealous of it, as of a rival. They speak of it as of some secret advice that ceases upon a man, and makes him a prior from genteel society. I would lay a guinea that many ladies who have just been kind enough to read the above lines lays down the book, after this confession of mine, that I am a smoker, and says, oh the vulgar wretch, and passes on to something else. He goes on to prophesy, and for once the most gratuitous of follies, has been justified by the invent, the tobacco will conquer. Look over the white word. He says to the ladies, and see that your adversary has overcome it. Germany has been puffing for three square years, France smokes to a man. Do you think you can keep the enemy out of England? Sha, look at his progress, ask the club houses, have they smoked in rooms or not? Are they not obliged to yield to the general want of the age, in spite of the resistance of the old women on the communities? I, for my part, do not despair to see a bishop rolling out of the oven come with a churrut in his mouth, or at any rate, a pipe stuck in his shovel head. The flight of fancy in the last sentence has hardly yet been fulfilled. But I saw, many years ago, a distinguished man of letters, the late Mr. Francis Turner Pagory, of Golden Treasury fame, who was an inveterate smoker, sitting on one of the cane benches by the door of the oven come club, smoking a short clay pipe. Tecret does not appear to have realized that tobacco was not invading England for the first, but for the second time, nor did he foresee that the ladies, to whom he had addressed his impassioned defense of smoking, would not only submit to the conqueror, but would themselves be found among his joyous devotees. George Feisbudo recounts how, as a boy, he was flocked for smoking, and how, at Oxford, smoking among other villainies led to his restocation. Later, his tobacco, combined with insolence to his tobacco-hating kernel, conducted him out of the army into the retirement of civil life, and so on and so on. There is, of course, an element of exaggeration in all this, but Mr. Feisbudo's experiences and reflections threw much light on the social history of smoking the early decades of the 19th century. Mr. Harry Furness, in the preface to his edition of Tecret, has an admirable interest in the pertinent paragraph on this aspect of the Feisbudo's papers. He says, no gentleman in those days were seen smoking even a weed in the streets. Cigarettes were practically unheard of in England, and outside one's private smoking room, pipes were tabooed, men in society slunk into their smoking rooms, or when there was no smoking room, into the kitchen or servant's house after the domestics had retired. Smoking jacket was worn in the place of their ordinary evening coats, and their well-allowed, massive head of hair was protected by a gorgeously decorated smoking cap. Thus, the outdoor of tobacco was not brought into the drawing room. The fear of outdoor of tobacco smoke was extraordinary. Mr. G.C. Buckmaster, in his reminiscences, describes the famous debating society at Colgers Hall, and says that after one night at the Colgers, it took three days on a common to purify your clothes from the smoke. The journalists and the bohemians who met at the Colgers were about, or below the dictates of fashion, and smoking was always a feature of their gatherings. The yard of clays provided gratis for members, and it is to its almost universal use, says Mr. Peter Rayla, in his book on the Colgers and Fleet Streets, that the Colgers owed their existence in the present quarters. Once upon a time, the Colgers won to a well-appointed room, where carpet covered the floors, and the chair was upholstered, and the tables had finally polished marble tops. The hot pipes and smoldering matches stained the table tops and burnt the carpets, so that they had the option of abandoning either the pipe or the quarters. Old customers died hard with Colgers, and they stuck to their pipe. The pipe is a feature in our illustration of cauderian meetings. The influence of court was fully against smoking. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Consort detested it, so tobacco was taboo wherever the court was. The late lady Dorothy Neville, who lived to see the new triumph of tobacco, said that she felt the greatest minor change in social habits, which she had witnessed was that in the attitude assumed toward smoking, which in her youth, and even later was accepted in certain well-defined circumstances, regarded as a little less than a heinous crime. The Lady Dorothy remarked that smoking rooms in country houses were absolutely unknown, but that was not quite correct as we shall see in the experiences of Professor Van Hozendor, to be mentioned directly. Such gentlemen as wish to smoke after the lady had gone to bed, used as a matter of course to go either to the servants' house or to the harness room in the stables, where a nice sound sort of rough preparation was generally made for their accommodation. Well, do I remember the immense care which devotees of tobacco used to take when selling forth in the country to enjoy it, now to allow the faintest width of the smoke to penetrate into the house as they lit their cigars at the door? In 1845, Dickens wrote, I generally take a cigar after dinner when I'm along. The reservation in the last three wars may be noted. In the Book of Snaps, Major Wellsley Ponto goes to smoke a cigar in the stables. Ponto had no smoking room with Lord Gilles, who is described as a very young, short, sandy-haired, and tobacco-smoking nobleman who cannot have left the nursery very long. Later, Ponto and Gilles resume smoking operations in the now vacant kitchen. Even so late as 1861, the attitude toward smoking was still much the same in some quarters. In that year, a German scholar, Professor Franz von Hozendorf, paid a visit to a country gentleman's house in Gloucestershire, Hardwicko. Later, he printed an account of his experiences, a translation of which was published in this country in 1878. When the professor arrived, his host and the first greeting over was once pointed out to him a secluded apartment, the one which he thought was most important for Germans to know, namely the smoking room. According to his idea, continuing the professor, every German had three national characteristics, smoking, singing, and Sabbath breaking. The first and the only idea in which I found him led astray by an abstract theory. Later, his hostess, explaining to him the method and routine of life in an England country house, said that the ladies retired about 11. Well, the gentleman finished their days working the smoking room, the secluded apartment, or enjoyed the cigar at the billiard table. But the smoke in the billiard table room was only allowed if that room was not near the drawing room or in the hall close by. You must have often been surprised, she continued, that with English ladies have such invincible repugnance to tobacco smoke, but there is no dispensation from our rule of abstinence, except in those rooms which my husband has already pointed out to you. The professor, after lunching, was surprised by the squire who on any other occasion will never waste time in smoking and only filled his short clay pipe at the end of his day's work to come to his smoking room. As regards, this room the professor dryly remarked, I felt I had noticed that even the keyhole was stopped up in order to preserve the ladies' delicate nerves from every discreable sensation. After dinner, again, when the lady had left the table, the gentleman passed the bottle of port, sherry and claret, with the regularity of planets from hand to hand, but no one dreamed of smoking. That was reserved for the secluded apartment after the lady had gone to bed. Neither host nor guest imagined what a revolution another generation or so would make in these social habits. In the fifties, the pipe smoked was mostly clays, there was a long clays or church warden to be smoked in hours of ease and leisure, and a short clay cottage, which could be smoked while a man was at work. Milo, a tobacconist in the strength and in the weak, whose shop was near Leschester Square, was famous for their pipes, which could be built for six penny apiece. At the last point of 1853, in praise of an old black pipe says, Think not of mere shum is that bold, away, if only through the ashes is common clay. By Milo's stamps, purchased by Milo's hand, and for a tizzy purchase in the strand. I'm indebted for this quotation to a correspondent of Knows and Queries, September 27, 1913. Another correspondent of the same journal, Colonel W. F. Priddle, also replying a query of mine, wrote, Before briar woodpipes came into common use, clay pipes were of necessity smoked by all classes. When I matriculated at Oxford at the Easter of 1853, university men used to be rather particular about the pipes they smoked. The finest were made in France, and the favorite brand was Phialates Saint-Omer. I do not know if this kind is still smoked, but it was made of soft clay but easily colored. In Taverns, of course, the church warden, beloved of Carlisle and Tennyson, was usually smoked to the accompaniment of Sheddy Guff at Simpson's fish ordinary at Billings Gate. These pipes were always placed on the table after dinner, together with scoops of shack tobacco, and a smoking palliament moistened with hot and 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. Colonel Harrod Mallett, at the same time, wrote, When I was a cadet at the St. Hurst in 1855 to 1858, Milo's caddy pipe were quite the thing, and the selection by cadets of a good one out of a fresh consignment packed in Saldis was easily washed by joints. Of course, we were imitating our parents. It was no doubt these caddy pipes, which I refer to in one of the sporting books of Robert Certes, as the clay pipes of the utility, in a private letter to me, which I'm privileged to quote. Colonel Preadle adds some further particular as to the social attitude of early Victorian days toward tobacco, particulars which are the more valuable and interesting as being supplied from personal recollection of those now some more distant days. The Colonel writes, When I was a young man, people never thought of smoking in that house agents called the reception rooms. The principal reason being that the occupation of these rooms were shared by ladies. And it was bad form, not by the way, a contemporary expression to smoke well in the company of the fair half of creation. Consequently, men had either to indulge in the practice out of doors or else, as you say, sneak away to the kitchen when the servants had gone to bed and puff up the chimney. It was only in large houses that a billiard table could be found. And even in a billiard table, a pipe or cigar was taboo if ladies were present. While smoking room could no more be found in middle class houses than bathrooms, both catties and church warden were smoked. But the latter, of course, were not adept for peoples. Engaged in the active pursuits and were essentially of what I may call the sanitary nature. You could not even work while holding a long church warden in your mouth. And consequently, the short clay was most favored by young men at St. Hurst, the universities. Laborers smoked short clay when out of doors and church warden when they rested from their labors and took their ease in their inn in the evenings. Mr. Furness, in the paragraph quoted in a previous page, says, No gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a weed in the streets. The nearest approach to this seems to have been smoking on club steps. Thackeray, in the 17th chapter of the Book of Snaps, speaks of Thandis smoking their cigars upon the steps of wise, most fashionable of clubs. And in an earlier chapter of young in sign famished lunging and smoking on the steps of Union Jack club, with half a dozen other young rakes of the 4th or 5th order. Two of Thackeray's own drawing in the Book of Snaps, in chapter 3 and 9, show men, one civil, the other military, smoking cigars out of doors. But as these were no doubt every in Snaps, the drawings may be except as proof of Mr. Furness' statement. In this same book, Thackeray says ironically, think of that din of abomination, which I'm told, has been established in some clubs called the smoking room. The center was very familiar with the smoking room at the club in Love the Whale. In the Little G, the original gallery club house was at 35 King Street, Convent Garden. When the club was founded in 1831, it had formerly been a quite old-fashioned family hotel. But apparently was not furnished with the smoking room for one of the first acts of the club, when the obtained possession of the house was to build out over the lease a large and comfortable smoking room. Shirley Brooks said that this room, which was reached by a young passage from the stranger's dining room, was not a cheerful apartment by daylight and one empty, but which at night and full was felt the most cheerful apartment in town. At other clubs of more fashion perhaps, but certainly of less good fellowship, smoking rooms made their way more slowly. At once, smoking was not allowed out till 1845. The Alfred Club founded in 1808, which Lord Byron described as a pleasant, a little to sober and literary, perhaps, but on the whole, a decent source on a rainy day, and which Sir William Fraser called a sort of minor oven con, old as that, in 1855, if report be true, to dispute about smoking. One section of the members wished for improvement smoking room, they called the existing room, which was at the top of the house. An infamous hole, while the more old-fashioned and more influential members objected to any improvement. The latter carried the day, but the consequent loss of members ruined the club, which soon after ceased to exist. This succession must have been subsequent to that of bishops, of whom at one time many members, but who left, it is said because of the introduction of a billiard table. The growth of cigar smoking was rapid. Mr. Stymus, in his book on tobacco, published in 1857, remarked that no way of using tobacco had made a more striking advance in England, within the preceding 20 years than cigars. For a long time, it had been confined in this country to the richer class of smokers, but when he wrote, it was in universal use. The wonders that there were so many men smoking cigars, the old domestic and club restrictions, as pillory, inaccurate pages were maintained so long. In 1853, Leach had an admirably drawn sketch in the punch of Peter Familius, in the absence of his wife, giving a little dinner. Beside him sits his small son, and on either side of the table sits two of his coroners. One has a cigar in his hand and is blowing a cloud of smoke, while the other is selecting a weed, the decanters and glasses, and with disgust written plainly on her face. The objectionable child beside him says, lower pot, are you going to smoke? My eye, won't you catch it when mom comes home for making the curtain smile. Another witness to the rapid development of cigar smoking is Captain Grono, the elder of the well-known reminiscences. Grono says that the famous surgeon, Sir Ashley Cooper, on one occasion, perceiving that he was found out smoking, cautioned him against that habit, telling him that it would soon or later be the cause of his death. This must have been before 1841 when Sir Ashley died. Writing in the 60s, Grono said, if Sir Ashley were now alive, he would find everybody with a cigar in his mouth. Men smoke nowadays whilst they are occupied in working or hunting, writing in carriages or otherwise employed, which shows how the prejudice against outdoor smoking was then breaking down. During the experience of a long life, however, continued Grono. He never knew but one person of whom it was said that smoking was the cause of his death. He was the son of an air researcher and an attach at our embassy in Paris. But alas, I have known thousands who have been carried out only into their love of the battle. Thackeray, as the satirist of the fullest social prejudice against smoking, was naturally inveterate smoker himself. He died in 1863 and so hardly saw the beginning of a change in the attitude of society towards the pestilent weed. But he was one of the many men of letters and artists who, despising the conventions of society, were largely instrumental in breaking down stupid restrictions and in overcoming senseless prejudice and were thus harrowed of freedom. Charles King's attitude was that of many artists. He smoked a little jackalpin clay pipe in his sky pallor, overlooking the strand, and did not care in the least what the world might think or not think about that or any other subject. Those who smoked pipes at Cambridge continued to smoke pipes afterwards. Whatever society might do, spadding, who spent his life on the elucidation of bacon, was one of the apostles, and he continued a pipe lover to the end. In 1832, we hear of Tennyson being in London with him and smoking all the day. Lady Richie in Tennyson and his friends says, I can remember vaguely, on one occasion through the cloud of smoke, looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave-head of the poet Laureates. He was sitting with my father in the twilight after some family meal in the old house in Kensington. Thackeray was a cigar smoker, but Tennyson was a devotee of the pipe. It was on this occasion as the poet himself reminded Thackeray's daughter that while the novelist was speaking, Lady Richie's little sister looked up suddenly from the book over which she had been absorbed, saying in her sweet childish voice, Papa, why do you not write books like Nicholas Nicobar? Tennyson wrote in memoriam as Chewell Rectory, near Lutterworth Leicestershire. The Rector was Mr. Elhurst, a native of the Poist Lincolnshire village, the latest historian of Lutterworth, such that the greatest pops of tobacco smoke, with which he, Tennyson, mellowed his fouls, proved insufferable to his host, and he was accordingly turned out into Mr. Elhurst's workshop in the garden, which in consequence became the birthplace of one of the gems of English literature. About 1842, when Tennyson often died at the Old Cock by Temple Bar and at other taverns, the perfect dinner for his taste, says his son, was a beefsteak, a potato, a cut of cheese, a pint of pork, and afterwards a pipe. When the kinsley played the Tennyson a visit about 1859, Charles Kinsley, so the laureates told his son, talked as usual on all sorts of topics, and worked hard up and down the study for hours smoking furiously, and affirming that tobacco was the only thing that kept his nerves quiet. The late laureate, Alfred Elstein, once asked Tennyson, after reading the passage in Dorothy's Wordsworth Journal, that William had gone to bed very tired with writing the prelude, if he had ever felt tired by writing poetry. I think now said the poets, but tired with the accompaniment of too much smoking. Kinsley's devotion to smokes seems to have surprised Tennyson, who was no light smoker himself. The most curious style in illustrating Kinsley's love of tobaccos is that told in the life of Archbishop Benson by his son, Mr. A. C. Benson. One day about at the year 1860, the future Archbishop was working with Rector of Aversley in a remote part of the parish. Unaccompanied, when Kinsley suddenly said, a master smoker pipe. In the fourth week went to a third boost and felt about in it for a time. Presently he produced a clay church water pipe, which he lighted and suddenly smoked as he worked, putting it when he had done into a hole among some tree roots, telling my father that he had a cache of pipes in several places in the parish to meet the exigencies of a sudden desire for tobacco. If this story did not appear in the life of Archbishop, some skepticism on the part of the reader might be excused. Carlisle, as everyone knows, was a great smoker. The story is familiar. It might be true that one evening he and Tennyson sat in the solemn silence smoking for hours, one on each side of the fireplace, and that when the visitor rose to go, Carlisle, as he bathed him good night, said, Man, Alfred, we have had a great night come again soon. Tennyson's own devotion to tobacco led on at least one occasion to a peculiar and somewhat questionable preceding. Mr. W. Amrosity had a temporary acquaintance with the poet, and in the reminiscences which he published in 1806, he told a curious acne adult concerning him which was new to print, Rosity told, on the authority of owner. How, in the course of a trip with friends to Italy, tobacco such as Tennyson could smoke gave out as some particular city, whereupon the poet packed up his pot mental and returned home, breaking up the party. The late Joseph Knight, who revealed Rosity's volumes in the outing come, vouched for the truth of his relation, which he had heard not only from owner, but also from Tennyson's brother Septimus. In more fashionable circles, the mere possession of a pipe might be looked at as against. Robertson's comedy society was produced in 1865, and in it, Tom Stylas, a somewhat Bohemian journalist, has the misfortune. In a fashionable ballroom, when pulling off his handkerchief to bring out his pipe with it from his pocket, the vulgar thing falls upon the floor, and Tom is ashamed to claim his property, and so acknowledge his ownership of a pipe. He presently calls a footman, who comes with a tree and a sugary tongue, pick up the offending briar with the tongue, and carries it up with an air of ineffable disgust. And the graduates, like men of letters, do not pay much attention to the conventional attitudes of society towards tobacco, and pipes maintain their popularity in college rooms. Thackery, in the book of Snobbs, describes youth at the university's wine party, as drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, seeing bad sounds over and over again. Milk punch, smoking, gasoline headache, frightful spectacle of dessert table next morning, and smell of tobacco, but the satirists often tend to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at least too highly colored. In the recently published memoir of Jay, joined Willis Clarke, some reminiscences of the late registry are included, and Jay does not recognize Thackery's picture as quite true of the wines of his undergraduate day. That is, about 1850, they may, he says, have told bad stories and some bad sounds. As Thackery says in his book of Snobbs, I can only say that I never heard either one or the other, but certainly there was noise, and there was smoke, plenty of it. Conversation there was none, says Jay, only a noise. Then came smoke. In a short time, the atmosphere became dense. The desert and the wine came to an end, and it was chapel time. One sorry Clarke tells of an extraordinary attempt to smoke. Referring to the compulsory chapels, he says that as a rule, everybody behaved with propriety, whether they regarded the tenants as irksome or otherwise. But here the myth, iniquity corner, as the space at the east end on each side of the altar was caught, may occasionally have in factually sheltered card playing, but when a young snob went so far as to light a cigar there, he had the pleasure of finishing it in the country, for he was rusticated. It was on a cognitive occasion in Jesus College, in which Cobb Lerswax played a prominent part. That Dr. Corey dismissed the culprits after a severe lecture with these admirable words. Your conductor is for the Christian with color profane and a gentleman vulgar. At Oxford in November 1859, the vice chasteler and the proctor's issue be following notice, which shows that occasional outbreak of bad manners might happen on the Isis as on the camp. Weird as complaints have been made that some undergraduate members of the university are in the habit of smoking, as public entertainments and otherwise creating annoyance, they are hereby cautioned against the reputation of such a gentlemanlike conduct. There was plenty of smoking among undergraduate at Oxford in those days, as may be seen in such books as The Adventures of Mr. Virgin Green and Hugh's Tom Brown at Oxford, both of which date from 1861, when Tom, after reading about, felt of going out. There was a wine party at one of his acquaintances' rooms, where he could go and smoke a cigar in the pool room or at any other one of those and other places. Cigar was the fashionable form of smoke. When Tom offers his box to Captain Hardy, that worthy sound says, you might as well give him a glass of absent, he is churchwarden at home, and can't smoke anything but a long clay, with which the old sailor was accordingly supplied. A striking example of the attitude of the mid 19th century days towards tobacco may be found in connection with real ways and real way traveling. In the early days of such travel, there were no smoking compartments, and indeed, smoking was strictly forbidden practically everywhere on real way premises. Relics of this time may still be seen in many stations, and are many platforms in the shape of some more dingy play cards, in the shape of some more dingy play cards announcing that smoking is strictly forbidden, and that the penalty is so much. Nowadays, the incense from pipes and cigarette curses freely run these obsolete notices, and it helps to make them still dingy here. If you wanted to smoke when traveling, you had either to contrive to get a compartment to yourself, or to arrange term with your fellow travelers. In the puncture of 1855, this drew a real way platform scene, wherein figures one of those precocious youngsters of a type loved to draw. The real way porter says to his mates, as the two gaze at the back of this small smell, with his cane and top hat, with a seasail bill. Why? He says he must have a compartment to himself, because he can't get out without his smoke. Another drawing in the punch of 1861 points the same moral. It represents an elderly party, and a fast and tone incited side by side in a first class compartment. The latter has a cigar in one hand, and with the other offers coins to his neighbor. The explanation is as follows. Old party. Really, sir? I'm the manager of the line, sir. I must inform you that if you're persisting in smoking, you'll be fined 40 shillings, sir. Fast and toney. Well, old boy. Must have my smoke. Soon may as well take your 40 shillings now. Tobacco was always popular in the army, and even the strongest of anti-tobaccoists would have failed that there was at least something, if not much, to be said for the abused weed. When in times of campaigning suffering, it played so beneficent, a party in sleeping and comforting wary and wounded men. The period covered by this chapter include both the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, and everyone knows how the soldiers in the Crimean and in Indian life craved for tobacco. As for one of the greatest luxuries, and how even occasional smoke cheered, and encouraged and sustained suffering humanity, the late Dr. Norman Kerr, who was no friend to ordinary everyday smoking, wrote, There are occasions, such as in the trenches during military operations, when worn out with exposure and fatigued, or when exhaled by slow starvation with no food in prospect, when the pipe where cigar will be welcome and available for any need, resting in the very limbs, cheering the fainting heart, allaying the gnawing hanger of the empty stomach. Sir G.W. Forrest, in his book on the Indian Mutiny, tells how at the Siege of Luck now, as the months of August advanced, the tea and sugar, except the small store kept for invalids, were exhausted. The tobacco was gone, and Europeans and natives suffered greatly from the one of it. The soldiers yearned for a pipe after a hard day's work, and smoked dry leaves as the only substitute they could obtain. Mr. L.E.R. Reese, in his diary of the same Siege noted, I've given up smoking tobacco, and have taken to tea leaves and neem leaves, and guava fruit leaves instead, which the poor soldiers are also constantly using. The neem tree is better known perhaps as the margosa, as the margosa. It yells bitter all you, and is supposed to possess frivolous properties. Among the general mass of the population in the early Victorian period, smoking though certainly not so out-prevailing as now, was yet very common. It is highly probable that one of the things which led to the great increase in pipe smoking, which took place from this time onwards, was the introduction of the briar pipe. The earliest example of the use of wooden pipe at Mathwaite is dated 1765, but this was not in England. Many years ago, the late A.J. Mumbai pointed out that a small weight in one of his letters dated March 18, 1765, giving an account of his journey from Nice to Turin, describes how he has seen the mountain brothers, and on the top thereof met a quixotic figure, whom he does pictures. He was very tall, meager, and yellow with a long hooked nose and twinkling eyes. His head was cased in a wooden net cap, over which he wore a flapped head. He had a silk handkerchief about his neck, and his mouth was furnished with a short wooden pipe, from which he discharged breathing clouds of tobacco smoke. This scared claw turned out to be an Italian margress, and no doubt the singularity of his smoking apparatus was of peace with the singularity of his attire. Mr. Mumbai, after this reference to Smiley's adventure, proceeded to claim the honor of having helped to bring the use of wooden pipes into England. In the year of 1853, he wrote, Mirshams and Klase were the rule at both the England universities and in outshops throughout the land, and the art of making pipes of wood was either obsolete, it had never been introduced, or wholly infertile. But a college friend of mine, a Norfolk squire, possessed a gardener who was of inventive turn. Though he was not a scarce man, this man conceived and wrote out the idea of making pipes of willow wood, cutting the bow out of a thick stem, and the tube out of thinner one growing from the bow, so that the whole pipe was in one piece. Willow wood is too soft, so that the pipes did not last long. But they were a valuable discovery, and a young squire's friend bowed them eagerly at 18 pins a piece. This experiment in the direction of wooden pipes was interesting, and it deserves to be remembered, but it was not long before the briar was introduced and carried everything before it. It was about 1859 that the use of the root of the White Heath, a native of the south of France, Corsica, and some other localities for the purpose of making tobacco pipes was introduced in this country. The word briar or briar has no connection whatever with the prickly, thorny briar which bears the lovely weld rose. It is derived from the French Heath, the root of the White Heath being the material known as briar or briar, and at first as brewery. The Oxford dictionary calls an advertisement from the tobacco treat review of so recent data as February 8, 1868, of a Heath pipe in briar wood. The briar pipe not only soon drove the clay largely out of use, but immensely increased the number of pipe smokers. Boer Lytton may not have known the briar, but he wrote enthusiastically of the pipe. Every smoker knows the glowing tribute he paid to it in his night and morning, which appeared in 1841. It is closer and more to the point than most panellists. A pipe. It is a great suitor, a pleasant confoter. Blue devils fly before a soundest breath. It ripens the brain, it opens the heart, and the man who smokes thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan. End of chapter 10. Chapter 11 of The Social History of Smoking. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Social History of Smoking by G. L. Apperson. Chapter 11. Later Victorian Days. When life was all a summer day and I was under twenty, three loves were scattered in my way, and three at once are plenty. Three hearts, if offered with a grace, one thinks not of refusing. The task in this special case was only that of choosing. I know not which to make my pet, my pipe, cigar, or cigarette, Henry S. Lee. The Social History of Smoking in Later Victorian Days is marked by the triumph of the cigarette. The introduction of the cigar, as we have seen, brought about the revival of smoking from the point of view of fashion in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the coming of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun. The earliest references to the word cigarette in the Oxford Dictionary are dated 1842 and 1843, but both refer to the smoking of cigarettes abroad in France and Italy. The 1843 quotation is from a book by Mrs. Romer in which she says, the beggars in the streets have paper cigars called cigarettes in their mouths. The wording here would seem to show that cigarettes were not then familiar to English people. Lawrence Oliphant, who was both a man of letters and a man of fashion, is generally credited with the introduction into English society of the cigarette, but it is difficult to suggest even an approximate date. Writing from Boulogne to W. H. Wills in September 1854, Dickens says, I have nearly exhausted the cigarettes I brought here, and proceeds to give directions for some to be sent to him from London. This is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette smoking in England, but it is possible that by cigarettes Dickens meant not what we now know as such, but simply small cigars. Mr. H. M. Hindman, in his Record of an Adventurous Life, says that when he was living as a pupil about the year 1860 with the rector of Oxford, his fellow pupils included Edward Abbott of Selinaika, who, poor fellow, was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings at the beginning of the Turkoservian War. Cigarette smoking, now so popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself, was the first devotee of this habit I encountered. Fairholt, in his book on tobacco, which was published in 1859, mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central America, but makes no reference to their use in this country. The late Lady Dorothy Neville said that although cigarettes are a modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When old peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece of paper, they called this a peppalito, and I fancy it was much the same thing as a cigarette. But if this were so, the habit must have died out long before the cigarette, as we know it, came into vogue. It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there may have been an occasional cigarette smoker in England, like the Edward Abbott of Mr. Hindman's Reminisces, yet it was not until a little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls of tobacco became at all common among Englishmen, and it is quite likely that the credit, or discredit, as the reader pleases, of bringing them into general and especially into fashionable use has been rightly given to Lawrence Oliphant. Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870. In Puck, which was published in that year, Hoeda, who is hardly an unimpeachable authority on the ways and customs of fashionable folk, though she loved to paint fancy pictures of their sayings and doings, pictures the row. The most fashionable lounge you have, but it is a republic for all that. There, she says, could Bill Jacobs lean against a rail with a clay pipe in his mouth and a terrier under his arm, close beside the Earl of Gileadine, with his cigarette and his eyeglass, and his pool-cut habiliments. Thirty years or more ago the late Andrew Lang wrote an article entitled Enchanted Cigarettes, which began, To dream our literary projects, Balzac says, is like smoking enchanted cigarettes, but when we try to tackle our projects to make them real, the enchantment disappears. We have to till the soil to sow the weed, to gather the leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manufactured, while there may be no market for them after all. Probably most people have enjoyed the fragrance of these cigarettes and have brooded over much, which they will never put on paper. Here are some of the ashes of the weeds of my delight, memories of romances where of no single line is written, or is likely to be written. What Balzac said in his La Cousin Bet was Poncez, rêvé, concevoir de belle oeuvre, est une occupation délicieuse. C'est fumer des cigars enchantés, c'est mener la vie de la courtisane, occupée à sa fantaisie. Balzac's cigars became cigarettes in Lang's fantasy. The French novelist seems to have been one of those who praised tobacco without using it much himself. In his Illusion's Perdues, Carlos Herrera, who was Vatrine, says to Lucien, whom he meets on the point of suicide, M.A. Le Breton, however, in the book on Balzac, Lomé et Lovère, says, although he would sit working at his desk for twenty-five hours running. About the time that Lang's article was written, Sir F. C. Bernan's Berlesque Bluebeard was produced at the Gayety Theatre. In those days a certain type of young man, since known by many names, including the present day nut, was called a masher, and Bernan's Berlesque included a duet with the refrain. We are masher's we are, as we smoke our cigar and crawl along never too quick. We are masher's, you bet, with the light cigarette and the quite irreproachable stick. Nowadays the cigarette is in such universal use that it would be impossible thus to associate it with any particular type of man, sane or inane. The late bishop Mandel Creighton of London was an incessant smoker of cigarettes. Mr. Herbert Paul, in his paper on the bishop, says that those who went to see him at Fulham on a Sunday afternoon always found him, if they found him at all, leisurely, chatty, hospitable, and apparently without a care in the world. There was the family tea table, and there were the eternal cigarettes. The bishop must have paid a fortune in tobacco duty. There is a side view of another tobacco lover in the notebooks of Samuel Butler, the author of Erewan. Creighton, after reading Butler's Alps and Sanctuaries, had asked the author to come and see him. Butler was in doubt whether or not to go and consulted his clerk, Alfred, on the matter. That wise counselor asked to look at the bishop's letter, and then said, I see, sir, there is a crumb of tobacco in it. I think you can go. Apart from cigarette smoking, however, the use of tobacco grew steadily during the later Victorian period. In Mr. Punch's pocketbook for 1878, there was a burlesque dialogue between Uncle and Nephew titled, Cupid and Backey. The uncle thinks the younger men smoke too much, and declares that tobacco has destroyed the susceptibility, which in my time made youngsters fall in love, as they often did with a girl without a penny. No fellow can fall in love when he has continually a pipe in his mouth, and if he ever feels inclined to when it would be imprudent, why he lights his pipe, and very soon smokes the idea of such folly out of his head. Not so when I was your age. Besides a few old farmers, church wardens, and overseers and such, nobody then ever smoked but laborers and the lower orders, cadds, as you now say. Smoking was thought vulgar. Young men never smoked at all. To smoke in the presence of a lady was an inconceivable outrage. Yet now I see you and your friends walking alongside of one another's sisters smoking a short pipe down the street. The girl's like it, says Nepos. In my time, replies Avunkelis, young ladies would have fainted at the bare suggestion of such an enormity. The dialogue ends as follows. Nepos, producing short clay. See here, uncle, this pipe is almost colored. How long do you think I have had it? Avunkelis, can't imagine. Nepos, only three weeks. Avunkelis, good boy. In the same pocketbook, one of the ideals of a wife by a bachelor is to approve a smoking all over the house, while one of these ideals of a husband by a spinster is not to smoke or use a latch key. Mr. Punchin's collections, of course, are not to be taken too seriously. They all necessarily have the exaggeration of caricature, but at the same time they are all significant, and for the social historian are invaluable. Tobacco smoking was advancing victoriously all along the line. Observed old conventions and ridiculous restrictions had to give way or were broken through in every direction. The compartments for smokers on railway trains, at first provided sparsely and grudgingly, became more and more numerous. The practice of smoking out of doors, which the early Victorians held in particular abhorrence, became common, or at least so far as cigars and cigarettes were concerned. Lady Dorothy Neville, whose memory covered so large a part of the nineteenth century, said in the Leaves from her notebook, which was published in 1907, that to smoke in Hyde Park, even up to comparatively recent years, was looked upon as absolutely unpardonable, while smoking anywhere with a lady would, in the earlier days, have been classed as an almost disgraceful social crime. The first gentleman of whom Lady Dorothy heard as having been smoking a cigar in the park was the Duke of Sutherland, and the lady who told her spoke of it as if she had been present at an earthquake. Pipes were, and are, still looked at as scans in many places where the smoking of cigars and cigarettes is freely allowed, and fashioned frowned on the pipe in street or park. Of course, what one might do in the country and what one might do in town are two quite different things. The following story was told nearly twenty years ago of the late Duke of Devonshire. An American tourist began talking one day to a quiet-looking man who was smoking outside an inn on the Chatsworth estate, and, taking the man for the innkeeper, expressed his admiration of the Duke of Devonshire's domain. Quite a place, isn't it? said the American. Yes, a pleasant place enough, returned the Englishman. The fellow who owns it must be worth a mint of money, said the American through his cigar smoke. Yes, he's comfortably off, agreed the other. I wonder if I could get a look at the old chap, said the stranger, after a short silence. I should like to see what sort of a bird he is. Puff puff went the English cigar, and then said the English voice, trying hard to control itself. If you, puff, look hard, puff puff, in this direction, you, puff puff, can tell in a minute. You, you, faltered the American, getting up. Why, I thought you were the landlord. Well, so I am, said the Duke, though I don't perform the duties. I stay here, he added, with a twinkle in his eye, to be looked at. Among the chief strongholds of the old ideas and prejudices were some of the clubs. At the Athenium the only smoking-room used to be a combined billiard and smoking-room in the basement. It was but a few years ago that an attic story was added to the building, and smokers can now reach more comfortable corridors by means of a lift put in when the alterations were made in 1900. This new smoking-room is a very handsome, largely booked-flying department. At the end of the room is a beautiful marble mantelpiece of late 18th-century Italian work. At White's, even cigars had not been allowed at all until 1845, and when, in 1866, some of the younger members wished to be allowed to smoke in the drying-room, there was much perturbation, the older men's bitterly opposing the proposal. A general meeting was held to decide the question, says Mr. Ralph Neville, in his London clubs, when a number of old gentlemen who had not been seen at the club for years made their appearance stoutly determined to resist the proposed desecration. Where do all these old fossils come from? inquired a member. From Kenzel Green, was Mr. Alfred Montgomery's reply. Their herses, I understand, are waiting to take them back there. The motion for the extension of the facilities for smoking was defeated by a majority of twenty-three votes, and as an indirect result the Marlborough Club was founded. The late King Edward, at the time the Prince of Wales, is said to have sympathized strongly with the defeated minority at White's, and to have interested himself in the foundation of the Marlborough, where, for the first time in the history of West End club-land, smoking, except in the dining-room, was everywhere allowed. By smoking is no doubt here meant everything but pipes, which were not considered gentlemanly, even at the Garrick Club at the beginning of the present century. The late Duke de Mois was a social pioneer in pipe smoking. His caricature in Vanity Fair represents him with a pipe in his mouth, although he is wearing an opera hat, black frock coat buttoned up, and a cloak. By the end of the nineteenth century, the snuff box, which once upon a time stood upon the mantelpiece of every club, had disappeared. The habit of snuffing had long been falling into despotude. The cigar dealt the snuff box its death blow, and the cigarette was chief mourner at its funeral. As in other periods, men of letters and artists ignored the social prejudices and conventions about tobacco, and laughed at the artificial distinctions drawn between cigars and pipes. It is said that the late Sir John Millay smoked a clay pipe in his carriage when he was part of the first jubilee procession of Queen Victoria, a performance, if it took place, which would certainly have horrified her tobacco-hating majesty. Tennyson and his friends smoked their pipes as they had always done, and old-fashioned clay pipes, too. Sir Norman Lockyer, referring to a period about 1867, mentions Monday evenings in his house which were given up to friends who came in, sans ceremony, to talk and smoke. Clays from Brosley, including church portans and some of larger size, Frank Buckland's held an ounce of tobacco, were provided, and the confirmed smokers, Tennyson, an occasional visitor, being one of them, kept their pipes on which the name was written in Iraq for future symposia. Of the other great Victorian poets, Morris was a pipe smoker, and so was Rosetti. Browning also smoked, but not, I think, a pipe. Swinburne, on the other hand, detested tobacco and expressed himself on the subject with characteristic extravagance and vehemence. James I was a knave, a tyrant, a fool, a liar, a coward, but I love him, I worship him, because he slit the throat of that blaggard Raleigh who invented this filthy smoking. Professor Blackie, in a letter to his wife, remarked, The first thing I said on entering the public room was, What a delightful thing the smell of tobacco is in a warm room on a wet night! I gave my opinion with great decision that tobacco, whiskey, and all such stimulants or sedatives, had their foundation in nature, could not be abolished, or rather should not, and must be content with the check of a wise regulation. Even pious ladies were fond of tea, which, taken in excess, was worse for the nerves than a glass of sherry. One of the most distinguished of Victorian men of letters, John Ruskin, was a great hater of tobacco. Notwithstanding this, he sent Carlisle, an inveterate smoker, a box of cigars in February 1865. In his letter of acknowledgment Carlisle wrote, Dear Ruskin, you have sent me a magnificent box of cigars. For which can I say an answer? It makes me both sad and glad. I, de me, we are such stuff, gone with a puff, then think, and smoke tobacco. In the later years of his life, spent at Brantwood, Ruskin's guests found that smoking was not allowed even after dinner. Another and greater Victorian, Gladstone, was also a non-smoker. He is said, however, on one occasion, when King Edward, as Prince of Wales, dined with him in Downing Street, to have toyed with a cigarette out of courtesy to his illustrious guest. It was in the latter years of his life that Tennyson told Sir William Harcourt one day that his morning pipe after breakfast was the best in the day, an opinion, by the way, to which many less distinguished smokers would subscribe, when Sir William, laughingly replied, the earliest pipe of half-awakened bards. The companion burlesque line, the earliest pipe of half-awakened bird's-eye, appears, with one from Homer and one from Virgil, at the head of Arthur Sedgwick's poem in Greek Iambics, Tobacco, in Echoes from the Oxford Magazine, 1890. Sedgwick's praise of tobacco, classically draped in Greek verse, occasionally of the macaronic order, is delightful. He hails the pipe as a work of pan, and the divine smoke as the best and most fragrant of gifts. Healer of sorrow, companion and joy, rest for the toilers, drink for the thirsty, warmth for the cold, coolness in the heat, and a cheap feast for those who waste away through hunger. How is it, he says, that through so many ages men who have need of thee have not seen thy nature? Often, he continues, the verses may be roughly translated, often when I am in alpine solitudes tied to a chain to a few companions, clinging to the rope while barbarians lead the way, carrying in my hands an ice axe, Krustalo plega kersin axina inferon. And breathless crawling up the snow-covered plain, then when groaning I reached the summit, either pulled up or on foot, how have I rested on my back and the rocks, charming my soul with thy divine clouds? He goes on in burlesque strain to speak of the joys of tobacco when he lies in idleness by the streams in breathless summer, comforted by a bath just taken, or when in the middle of the night he is worn out by revising endless exercises, underlining the mistakes in red and allotting marks, or weighed down by the wise men of old. Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, the ideas of Plato, Wiles of Pindar, fearfully corrupt Strophe of Chorus, wondrous guesses of tutons and fancies of philologists, when men swoon in the inexplicable wanderings of the endless examination of Homer, when the brain reels among much toil. Then he hails the pipe, help of mortals, and hastens to kindle sacrifices at its altars, and rejoices as he tastes its smoke. Let someone, he exclaims, bring Bryant and May's fire, which strikes a light only if rubbed on the box. And taking the best and blackest bowl, and putting on Persian slippers, sitting on the softest couch, I will light my pipe with my feet in the hearth, and I will cast aside all mortal care. Nor must the delightful verses by J.K.S. be forgotten, in which the author of Lapsus Calami sings of the Grand Old Pipe, and I'm smoking a pipe which is fashioned like the face of the Grand Old Man. In the quaint similarity or comparison between the pipe and Gladstone, the Grand Old Man, when Lapsus Calami appeared in 1888, is maintained throughout. Grows he black in his face with his labors? Well, so does my Grand Old Pipe. For the sake of its excellent savor, for the many sweet smokes of the past, my pipe keeps its hold on my favor, though now it is blackening fast. But although many pipes were smoked at the universities, there were occasionally to be found odd survivals of old prejudices. Dr. Shipley, in his recent memoir on John Willis Clark, the Cambridge Registrary, says that even in the seventies of the last century there was an elderly Don at Cambridge who once rebuked a junior fellow who was smoking a pipe in the wilderness with the remark, no Christian gentleman smokes a pipe, or if he does he smokes a cigar. The perpetrator of this bull was the same person who married late in life and returning to his church after a honeymoon of six weeks publicly thanked God for three weeks of unalloyed cannubial bliss.