 CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XII. Smoking in the 20th Century. Sweet when the morn is gray, sweet when they've cleared away lunch and at close of day, possibly sweetest. C. S. Calverly. Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of 300 years is complete. Since the early decades of the 17th century, smoking has never been so generally practiced 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. Perhaps the most absurd and unmeaning of the restrictions that remain is that which at certain times and in certain places admits the smoking of cigars and cigarettes and forbids the smoking of pipes. The idea appears to be that a pipe is vulgar. There are few restaurants now in which smoking is not allowed after dinner, but the understanding is that cigars and cigarettes only shall be smoked. In some places of resort there are notices exhibited which specifically prohibit the smoking of pipes. Why? At a smoking concert where few pipes are smoked, anyone looking can at once realize how much greater is the volume of smoke from cigars and cigarettes than would result from the smoking of a like number of pipes. It cannot therefore be that pipes are barred because of a supposed greater effect upon the atmosphere of the room. The only conclusion the observer can come to is that the fashionable attitude towards pipes is one of the last relics of the old social attitude, the attitude of Georgian and early Victorian days, towards smoking of any kind. The cigar and the cigarette were first introduced among the upper classes of society, and their use has spread downward. They have broken down many barriers, and in many places, and under many and diverse conditions. The pipe has followed triumphantly in their wake, but the last ditch of the old prejudice has been found in the convention which, in certain places and at certain times, admits the cigar and cigarette of fashionable origin, but bars the entry of the plebeian pipe, the pipe which for two centuries was practically the only mode of smoking used or known. An article which appeared in the morning post of February 20th, 1913, may be regarded as a sign of the times. It was entitled, A Plea for the Pipe, by one who smokes it. I should like, said the writer, pipe men of all degrees to ask themselves whether the time has not really arrived to enter a protest against the convention which forces the pipe into a position of inferiority and exalts to a pinnacle of undeserved preeminence the cigar and still more the cigarette. Why should it be considered a mark of vulgarity of plebeianism to inhale tobacco smoke through the stem of a briar and the hallmark of good breeding to finger a cigar or dally with that triviality and travesty of the adoration of My Lady Nicotine a cigarette? To these questions there can be but one answer, and the future, there can be little doubt, will emphasize that answer and abolish the unmeaning convention. The prejudice against the pipe is not confined to places of indoor resort. There are many men who smoke pipes within doors who would yet not care to be seen in London smoking a pipe in the street or in the park. In some circumstances this is quite intelligible. The writer of the morning post article remarked with much force and good sense that, apart from social environment, there is a certain affinity between pipes and clothes. It is considered bad form for a man in a frock coat and silk hat to be seen smoking a pipe in the streets. If you are wearing a bowler hat and a lounge suit, you may walk along with a briar protruding from your lips, and no one will think ill of you. If you are a son of toil, garbed in your habit as you work, there is nothing incongruous in a well-seasoned clay or a nose warmer, which for convenience you carry upside down. Not so very long ago it was considered unseemly to smoke a pipe at all in the street unless you belonged to the humbler orders, who inhale their nicotine through the stem of a clay and expectorate with a greater sense of freedom than of responsibility. At a few clubs there are still some curious and rather unmeaning restrictions. A particularly absurd rule that maintains its ground here and there is that which forbids smoking in the library of a club. What more appropriate place could there be for the thoughtful consumption of tobacco than among the books? But after due allowance has been made for a few minor restrictions of this kind, the fact remains that smoking has triumphed socially all along the line in club land. We have traveled far from the days when a committee man would declare that no gentleman smoked. To the time when, for example, the large smoking room at Brooks's is one of the finest rooms in one of the most famous and exclusive of clubs. This splendid room in the eighteenth century days of gambling was the grand subscription room, the gambling room of Georgian times. It still retains two of the old gaming tables. Now this magnificent apartment with its splendid barrelled ceiling, which a well-known architectural writer, Mr. Stanley C. Ramsey, A-R-I-B-A, describes as, probably the finest room of its kind in London, is the Temple of St. Nicotine. The stranger's smoking room in the same club, formerly the dining room, is another beautiful and delightfully decorated apartment. Similar transformations have been witnessed in other clubs. Barry's original plan for the Traveller's Club, erected in 1832, shows no smoking room on the ground floor. It was probably some inconvenient apartment of no account. The early Travellers did smoke, for Theodore Hook, satirizing them and the club rule that no person was eligible as a member who had not traveled out of the British Islands to a distance of at least five hundred miles from London in a direct line, wrote, The Travellers are in Paul Mall and smoke cigars so cosily, and dream they climb the highest Alps or rove the plains of Mosley. The world for them has nothing new, they have explored all parts of it, and now they are clubbed footed, and they sit and look at charts of it. The present day smoking room at The Traveller's is a noble apartment, which was originally the coffee room. It occupies the whole of the ground floor front to the gardens of Carleton House Terrace, and is divided into three bays by the projection of square piers. Another sign of the complete change which has come over the attitude of most folk towards tobacco, is to be seen in the permission of smoking at meetings of committees and councils, where not so long ago such an indulgence would have been regarded as an outrage. Many of the committees of municipal councils and other public bodies now permit smoking while business is proceeding. It has even become usual for members of the House of Commons to smoke in committee rooms when the sitting is private, and cigars and cigarettes and pipes are now lighted in the lobby the moment that the house has risen. A very thin line thus separates the legislative chamber itself from the conquering weed, a further step forward, or backward according to each reader's judgment, was taken on July 21, 1913, when smoking was allowed at the sitting of the Standing Committee on Scottish Bills, one of the committees which does not conduct its business in private. On this occasion, after the luncheon interval, two members entered the committee room smoking, one a cigarette, the other a cigar. The former was soon finished, but the latter continued to shed its fragrance on the room. Naturally, the chairman, Mr. Arthur Henderson, was appealed to. He gave a diplomatic reply. It had been held, he said, by two chairman, that smoking was not in order at the public sessions of a Standing Committee, and of course, if his ruling were formally asked, he would be bound to follow precedent. He said this with a suavity and a smile which disarmed any possible objector. Nobody raised the formal point of order, so other members lighted up, and the proceedings went on peacefully to the appointed hour of closing. Yet another sign of the times was the permission given not so very long ago to the drivers of taxicabs to smoke while driving fares, a development regarding which there may well be two opinions. The number of cigarette smokers nowadays is legion, but to a very large number of tobacconists, in the old sense of the word, a pipe remains the most satisfactory of smokes. A cigar or a cigarette is, and it is not. The pipe renders its service again and again and yet remains a steadfast companion. Over a pipe is a phrase of more meaning than over a cigarette. Discussions are best conducted over a pipe. No one can get too excited or overheated in argument. No one can neglect the observance of the amenities of conversation who talks thoughtfully between the poles at his pipe, who has to pause now and again to refill, to strike a light, to knock out the ashes, or to perform one of those numberless little acts of devotion at the shrine of St. Nicotine which fill up the pauses and conduce to reflection. The Indians were wise in their generation when they made the circulation of the pipe an essential part of their powwows. A conference founded on the mutual consumption of tobacco was likely, not, as the frivolous would say, to end in smoke but to lead to solid and lasting results. The fact is, squire, said Sam Slick, the moment a man takes a pipe he becomes a philosopher. The pipe, says Thackeray, draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher and shuts up the mouth of the foolish. It generates a style of conversation, contemplated, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected. May I die if I abuse that kindly weed which has given me so much pleasure. And what more fitting emblem of peace could be chosen than the Calumet, the proffered pipe? Tobacco, whatever its enemies may have said or may yet say, is the friend of peace, the foe at strife, and the promoter of geniality and good fellowship. Mrs. Battle, whose serious energies were all given to the great game of wist, unbent her mind we are told over a book. Most men unbend over a pipe, even if the book is an accompaniment. To the solitary man, the well-seasoned tube is an invaluable companion, if he happen once in a way to have nothing special to do and plenty of time in which to do it, he naturally fills his pipe as he draws the easy chair on to the hearth rug and knows not that he is lonely. If he have a difficult problem to solve, he just as naturally attacks it over a pipe. It is true that as the smoke-leaves ring themselves above his head, his mind may wander off into devious paths of reverie and the problem be utterly forgotten. Well, that is at least something for which to be grateful. For the paths of reverie are the paths of pleasantness and peace, and problems can usually afford to wait. Over a pipe. Why the words bring up innumerable pleasant associations, the angler, having caught the coveted prize, refills his pipe, and with the satisfied sense of duty done, as the rings curl upward, he reviews the struggle and glows again with victory. At the end of any day's occupation, especially one of pleasurable toil, whether it be shooting or hunting or walking or whatnot, what can be pleasanter than to let the mind meander through the course of the day's proceedings over a pipe? There is much wisdom in Robert Louis Stevenson's remarks in Virginibus perisque. Lastly, and this is perhaps the golden rule, no woman should marry a teetotewer or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this ignoble tabagy, as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy apart from thought or work. To provident women this will seem no evil influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness. Nothing is more marked in the change in the social attitude towards tobacco than the revolution which has taken place in women's view of smoking. The history of smoking by women is dealt with separately in the next chapter, but here it may be noted that most of the old intolerance of tobacco has disappeared. To smoke in Hyde Park, said the late Lady Dorothy Neville in 1907, even up to comparatively recent years was looked upon as absolutely unpardonable, while smoking anywhere with a lady would have been classed as an almost disgraceful social crime. Women do not nowadays shun the smell of smoke as they did in early Victorian days, as if it were the most dreadful of odors. They are tolerant of smoking in their presence in public places, in restaurants, in fact wherever men and women congregate, to a degree that would have horrified extremely their mothers and grandmothers. It is only within the last few years that visits to music halls and theaters of varieties have been socially possible to ladies. Women go largely because they can smoke during the performance. Women go largely because they have ceased to consider tobacco smoke as a thing to be rigidly avoided and therefore have no hesitation in accompanying their menfolk. The observant visitor to the promenade concerts, usually given in the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, will notice that but one small section of the grand circle is reserved for non-smokers, while smoking is freely allowed, with no absurd ban on the friendly pipe, and every other part of the great auditorium, floor, circle and balcony. There are still some people who share the Duke of Wellington's delusion that smoking promotes drinking, although experience proves the contrary, and historic evidence, especially as regards drinking after dinner, shows that it was the introduction of the cigar, followed by that of the cigarette, which absolutely killed the old, bad after-dinner habits. The Salvation Army do not enforce total abstinence from tobacco as well as from alcoholic drinks as a condition of membership or soldiership, but a member of the Army must be a non-smoker before he can hold any office in its rank, or be a bansman, or a member of a songster brigade. And in other religious organizations there are yet a few of the uncoup-guide who look as scant at pipe or cigarette as if it were a device of the devil, but the numbers of these misguided folk become fewer every year. Smoking in the dining room after dinner is now so general that people are apt to forget that this particular development is of no great age. It is not yet, however, universal. A valued correspondent tells me that he knows a house where tobacco is still kept out of the dining room and smoke indulged in elsewhere after wine. This old-fashioned habit must now be pretty rare. The chief legitimate objection to cigarette smoking was well stated some years ago by the late Dr. Andrew Wilson. I think cigarettes are apt to prove injurious, he said, because a man will smoke far too much when he indulges in this form of the weed, and because I think it is generally admitted that cigarettes are apt to produce evil effects out of all proportion to the amount of tobacco which is apparently consumed. Excess can equally be found among cigar and pipe smokers. The late Chancellor Parrish, in his Dictionary of the Sussex dialect, tells a delightful story of a Sussex rustic's holiday. Maybe you know Mass, mastered the distinctive title of a married laborer. Pillbeam? No. Doesn't he? Well, he was a very singular marn, was Mass Pillbeam, a very singular marn. He says to his mistress one day, he says, tis a long time, says he, since I've took a holiday, so cartonly next marnen, he laid a bed till pretty nigh seven o'clock, then he breakfast is, and then he goes down to the shop and buys fewer ounces of barca, and he sets himself down on the Maxon manure heap, and there he set, and there he smoked and smoked and smoked all the day long, for, says he, tis a long time, since I've had a holiday, ah, he was a very singular marn, a very singular marn indeed. Some men seem to act upon Mark Twain's principle of never smoking when asleep or at meals, and never refraining at any other time, but excess is self-condemned. There is no good reason why anyone, for social or any other reasons, should look a-scance at the reasonable use of tobacco. But used in moderation, what evils, let me ask, I again quote Dr. Andrew Wilson's calm good sense, are to be found in the train of the tobacco habit. A man doesn't get delirium tremens even if he smokes more than is good for him. He doesn't become a debased mortal. There is nothing about tobacco which makes a man beat his wife or assault his mother-in-law, rather the reverse, in fact for tobacco, is a soother and a quietener of the passions. And many a man, I daresay, has been prevented from doing rash things in the way of retaliation, when he has lit his pipe and had a good think over his affairs. Whenever anybody counterblasts today against tobacco, I feel as did my old friend Wilkie Cullins, when somebody told him that to smoke was a wrong thing. My dear sir, said the great novelist, all your objections to tobacco only increase the relish with which I look forward to my next cigar. Chapter 13 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, reading by Mixie of Eugene Oregon. The Social History of Smoking by G. L. Apresid and I. S. O., Chapter 13, Smoking by Women. These when pipes are brought, affect a swoon. They love no smoke except the smoke of town. Isaac Hawkins Brown, Circa 1740. A story is told of Sir Walter Raleigh by John Aubrey, which seems to imply that at first women not only did not smoke, but that they disliked smoking by men. Aubrey states that Raleigh, standing in a stand at Sir R. Poinsett's Park at Acton, took a pipe of tobacco, which made the ladies quit it till he had done. With this objection, whether general or not, soon vanished, for as we have seen in a previous chapter, the gallant of Elizabethan and Jacobian days made a practice of smoking in his ladies' presence. It seems certain, moreover, that some women at least smoked very soon after the introduction of tobacco, but it is not easy to find direct evidence that there are sundry traditions and illusions which suggest that the practice was not unknown. There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked, with unpleasant results. People in his history of Virginia says that Raleigh, having offered her majesty some tobacco to smoke, after two or three whiffs she was seized with a nausea upon observing which, some of the Earl of Leicester's factions whispered that Sir Walter had certainly poisoned her, but her majesty, in a short while recovering, made the countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe out among them. The Queen had no selfish desire to monopolize the novel sensations caused by smoking. An 18th-century writer, oldest in his life of Sir Walter Raleigh, declares that tobacco soon became of such vogue in Queen Elizabeth's court that some of the great ladies, as well as noblemen therein, would not scruple to take a pipe sometimes very sociably. But these stories rest on vague tradition and probably have no foundation in fact. King James I, in his famous counterblasted tobacco, hinted that the husband, by his indulgence in the habit, might reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome, and clean complexion wife to that extremity, that either she must also corrupt her sweet breather with, or else resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment. His majesty's style was forcible, if not elegant. There are also one or two references in the early dramatists. In Ben Johnson's Every Man in His Humor, for instance, which was first acted in 1598, six years before King James blew his royal counterblast, Cobb, the water bearer, says that he would have any man or woman that should but deal with the tobacco pipe immediately whipped. Prynne, in his attack on the stage, declared the women smoke pipes in theaters, but the truth of this statement may well be doubted. The habit was probably far from general among women, although Joshua Sylvester, a dowdy opponent of the weed, was pleased to declare that fools of all sexes haunt it, i.e. tobacco. The ballads of the period abound in rough woodcuts in which tavern scenes are often figured wherein pewter pots and tobacco pipes are shown lying in the table or in the hands or at the mouths of the male carousers. Men and women are figured together, but it would be very hard to find a woman in one of these rough cuts with a pipe in her hand or at her mouth. An example, in the Sherburn ballads, lies before me. The cut, which is very rough, has a Bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called A Knot of Good Fellows, and beginning Come hither, mine host, come hither! Come hither, mine host, come hither! I pray thee, mine host, give us a pot and a toast and let us all drink altogether. The scene is a tavern interior. Around the table are four men and a woman, while a boy approaches, carrying two huge measures of ale. One man is smoking furiously, while on the table lie three other pipes, one for each man, and sundry pots and glasses. The woman is plainly a convivial soul, but there is no pipe for her, and such provision was now doubt and usual. There is direct evidence, too, besides the story in the first paragraph of this chapter, that women dislike the prevalence of smoking. In Marston's Antonio Melinda, 1602, Rosalind, when asked by her uncle, when she will marry, makes a spirited reply, Faith kind uncle, when men abandon jealousy for sakes taking of tobacco and cease to wear their beards so rudely long. Oh, to have a husband with the mouth continually smoking with a bush of furs on the ridge of his chin, ready still to flop into his foaming chops, it is more than most intolerable. And similar indications of dislike to smoking could be quoted from other plays. On the other hand, it is certain that from comparatively early in the 17th century, there were to be found here and there women who smoked. On the title page of Middleton's comedy, The Roaring Girl, 1611, is a picture of the heroine, Moll Cuphurst, in Man's Apparel, smoking a pipe from which a great cloud of smoke is issuing. In the record of an early libel action, brought in the court of the Archdeacon of Essex, some domestic scenes of 1621 are vividly represented. We need not trouble about the libel action, but two of the dramatists for Sonnet were a certain George Thresher, who sold beer and tobacco at his shop in Romford, and a good friend and customer of his named Elizabeth Savage, who, sad to say, was described as much given to strong drink and tobacco. In the course of the trial on June 8th, 1621, Mr. Savage had to tell her tale, part of which is reported as follows. George Thresher kept to shop in Romford and sold tobacco there. She came diverse times to his shop to buy tobacco there, and sometimes the company of her acquaintance did take tobacco and drink beer in the hall of George Thresher's house, sometimes with the said George, and sometimes with his father and his brothers, and sometimes she hath had a joint of meat and a couple of chickens dressed there, and she and they and some other of her friends have dined there together and paid their share for their dinner, she being many times more willing to dine there than at an inner tavern. Elizabeth was evidently of a sociable turn, and though she turned her nose up at a tavern, there seems to have been little difference between these festive dinners at Mr. Thresher's shop where Mr. Savage indulged her taste for ale and tobacco and similar pleasures at an inner tavern. Some of the references to women smokers occur in curious connections. When one George Glapthorn of Whittlesley J.P. was returned to parliament for the Isle of Eli in 1654, his return was petitioned against, and among other charges it was said that just before the election in a certain Martin's ale house, he had promised to give Mrs. Martin a roll of tobacco and had also undertaken to grant her husband a license to brew, thus unduly influencing and corrupting the electors. Women smokers were not confined to any one class of society. Reverend Giles Moore, rector of Horsted Keane's Sussex, made a note in his Journal and Account Book in 1665 of Tobacco for My Wife, Three Pins. As from other entries in Mr. Moore's account book, we know that two ounces cost him one shilling. We may wonder what Mrs. Moore was going to do with her half ounce. There is no other reference to tobacco for her in the Journal and Account Book. Possibly she was not a smoker at all but needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose. There is ample evidence to show that in the 17th century, extraordinary medicinal virtues continued to be attributed to the divine weed. In some letters of the Appleton family printed some time ago from the originals in the Bodleian Library, there is a curious letter undated but of 1652 or 1653 from Susan Crane, the widow of Sir Robert Crane who is the second wife of Isaac Appleton, a Buckman-Vall Norfolk. Writing to her husband, Isaac Appleton at his chamber in Grey's Inn as his affectionate wife, the good Susan whose spelling is marvelous tells her, sweetheart, I have done all the tobacco you left me. I pray, send me some this week and some angelico seed and some carot seed. How much tobacco Mr. Appleton had provisioned his wife with cannot be known but it looks as if she were a regular smoker and did not care to be long without a supply. In 1631, Edmund House, who edited Stowe's Chronicles and continued them onto the end of this present year, 1631, wrote that tobacco was at this day commonly used by most men and many women. Anything like general smoking by women in the 17th century would appear to have been confined to certain parts of the country. Celia Fine, who traveled about England on horseback in the reign of William and Mary, tells us that at St. Austel in Cornwall, St. Austen, she calls it, she disliked the custom of the country which is a universal smoking. Both men and women and children all have their pipes of tobacco in their mouths and so sit round the fire smoking which is not delightful to me when I went down to talk with my landlady for information of any matter and customs amongst them. What would King James have thought of these depraved Cornish folk? Other witnesses bear testimony of to the prevalence of smoking among women in the west of England. Dunton in that Athenian oracle which was a kind of early forerunner of notes and queries alluded to pipe smoking by the good women and children in the west. Michonne, the French traveler who is here in 1698 after remarking that tobacco is very much used in England, says that the very women taken in abundance, particularly in the western counties. But why the very women? What occasion is there for that very? We wonder that in certain places it should be common for women to take tobacco and why should we wonder at it? The women of Devonshire and Cornwall wonder that the women of middle sex do not take tobacco and why should they wonder at it? In truth, our wonderments are very pleasant things and with that sage and satisfactory conclusion to his catechism, we may leave Monsieur Michonne though he goes on to philosophize about the effect of smoking by the English clergy upon their theology. Another French visitor to our shores, Monsieur Jovain, whose rare book of travels was published at Paris in 1672, was wandering in the west of England about the year 1666 and in the course of his journey stayed at the stag in in Worcester where he found he had to make himself quite at home with the family of his hostess. He tells us that, according to the custom of the country, the landlady's sup was strangers and passengers and if they have daughters, these also are of the company to entertain the guests at table with pleasant conceits where they drink as much as the men. But what quite disgusted our visitor was that when one drinks the health of any person and company, the custom of the country does not permit you to drink more than half the cup which is filled up and presented to him or her whose health you have drunk. Moreover, the supper being finished, they set on the table half a dozen pipes and a packet of tobacco for smoking which is a general custom as well among women as men who think that without tobacco one cannot live in England because they say it dissipates the evil humors of the brain. Although, according to Monsieur Michonne, the women of Devon and Cornwall might wonder why the women of Middlesex did not take tobacco, it is certain that London and its neighborhood did contain at least a few female smokers. Tom Brown often dubbed the facetious but to whom a sternor epithet might well be applied. Writing about the end of the 17th century mentions a vent nurse wife who having made her pile as might be said nowadays, retires to a little country house at Hampstead where she drinks sac two plentifully, smokes tobacco in an elbow chair and snores away the remainder of her life. And the same writer was responsible for a satirical letter to an old lady that smoked tobacco which shows that the practice was not general for the letter begins, Madam, though the ill-natured world censures you for smoking. Brown advised her to continue the innocent diversion because first, it was good for the toothache, the constant persecutor of old ladies and secondly, it was a great help to meditation which is the reason I suppose he continues that recommends it to your Parsons, the generality of whom can no more write a sermon without a pipe in their mouths than a concordance in their hands. From the evidence so far adducted it may be fairly concluded I think that during the 17th century smoking was not fashionable or indeed anything but rare. Among the women of the more wealthy two classes while among women of humbler rank it was an occasional and in a few districts of fairly general habit. The same conclusion holds good for the 18th century. Among women of the lowest class smoking was probably common enough. In Fielding's Amelia, a woman of the lowest character is spoken of as smoking tobacco, drinking punch, talking obscenely and swearing and cursing which accompaniments are all carefully noted because none of them would be applicable to the ordinary respectable female. The fine lady disliked tobacco. The author of A Pipe of Tobacco and Doddsley's well-known collection to which references already been made, wrote, ladies, when pipes are brought, affect a spoon. They love no smoke except the smoke of town. Citronia vows that has an odious stink. She will not smoke, ye gods, but she will drink. And the same writer describes tobacco as by ladies hated, hated by the bow. Although the fine lady may have affected to swoon at the sight of pipes and bills generally, like the bow may have disdained tobacco as vulgar, yet there were doubtless still to be found here and there respectable women who occasionally indulged in the smoke. In an early spectator, Addison gives the rules of a two-penny club erected in this place for the preservation of friendship and good neighborhood which met in a little alehouse and was frequented by artisans and mechanics. Rule two was every member shall fill his pipe out of his own box and rule seven was if any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or smokes. In one of the valuable volumes issued by the Georgian Society of Dublin a year or two ago, Dr. Mahaffey writing on the mid-18th century society of the Irish capital quotes an advertisement by a Dublin tobaccoist of mild pigtail for ladies which suggests the alarming question, did Irish ladies too? It has sometimes been supposed that this, that the companion of Swiss Stella, Mrs. Rebecca Dingley was addicted to smoking. In letters which make up the famous journal, Distella, there are several references by Swift to the presence of tobacco which he was in the habit of sending Mrs. Dingley. On September 21st, 1710, he wrote, I have the finest piece of Brazil tobacco for Dingley that ever was born. In the following month he again had a great piece of Brazil tobacco for the same lady and again in November. I've made Delville promise to send me some Brazil tobacco from Portugal for you, Madam Dingley. In December, Swift was expressing his hope that Dingley's tobacco had not spoiled the chocolate which he had sent for Stella in the same parcel. And three months later he wrote, no news of your box, I hope you have it and are at this minute drinking the chocolate and that the smell of the Brazil tobacco has not affected it. The explanation for all this tobacco for Mr. Dingley is to be found in Swiss letter to Stella of October 23rd, 1711. Then there's a miscellany, he writes. An apron for Stella, a pound of chocolate without sugar for Stella, a fine snuff rasp of ivory given me by Mrs. St. John for Dingley and a large roll of tobacco which she must hide or cut shorter out of modesty and four pairs of spectacles for the Lord knows who. Tobacco is clearly not for smoking but for Dingley to operate upon with the snuff rasp and so supply herself with snuff. A luxury which in those days was as much enjoyed and as universally used by women as by men. Even Quakers is sometimes smoked. A list of the sea stores put on board the ship in which certain friends, Samuel Fathergill, Mary Paisley, Catherine Peyton and others sailed from Philadelphia for England in June 1756 is still extant. In those days Atlantic passages were long and might last for an indefinite period and passengers provisioned themselves accordingly. On this occasion the passage though stormy winds very quick for it lasted only 34 days. The list of provisions taken is truly formidable. It includes all sorts of eatables and drinkables and astonishing quantities. The women's chest we are told contained among a host of other good and useful things. Balm, sage, summer savory, whorehound, tobacco and oranges, two bottles of brandy, two bottles of Micah Spirit, a canister of green tea, a jar of almond paste, gingerbread. Samuel Fathergill's new chest contained tobacco among many other things and a box of pipes was among the miscellaneous stores. The history of smoking by women through Victorian days need not detain us long. There have always been pipe smokers among the women of the poorer classes. Up to the middle of the last century smoking was very common among the hardworking women of Northumberland and the Scottish border. Nor has the practice by any means yet died out. In May 1913 a woman who was charged with drunkenness at the West Ham Police Court laid the blame for her condition on her pipe. She said she had smoked it for 20 years and it always makes me giddy. The writer in August 1913 saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland calmly smoking a large briar pipe. It's not so very long ago that an English traveler heard a working man courteously ask a Scottish fishwife who had entered a smoking compartment of the train whether she objected to smoking. The good woman slowly produced a well-seasoned cutty pipe and as she began to cut up a fill from a rank-smelling tobacco, replied, nah, nah, laddie, I've come in here for a smoked micelle. The Darlington and Stockton Times in 1856 recorded the death on December 10th at Wallbury in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the 110th year of her age of Jane Garbet widow. Mrs. Garbet had been twice married. Her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic Wars. The old woman said the journal had dwindled into a small compass that she was free from pain, retaining all her faculties to the last and enjoying her pipe. About a year ago, the writer of this notice paid her a visit and took her as a brother piper, a president of tobacco, which ingredient of bliss was always acceptable from her visitors. Asking of her the question how long she'd smoked, her reply was, very nah, 100 years. In 1845, there died at Buxton at the age of 96, a woman named Fizi Mali, who had been for many years and inveter as smoker. Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire. She had burned herself more than once before and performed the same operation, but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her end. The old Irish women who were once a familiar feature of London's street life as sellers of apples and other smallwares at street corners were often hardened smokers, and so were, and delas still are, many of the Gypsy women who tramped the country. An old Seven Dials ballad has the following choice, stanza. When first I saw Miss Bailey Twizzana Saturday, at the corner pinch she was drinking gin and smoking a yard of clay. Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign, females smoking in the 19th century in England may be said to have been pretty well confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned. Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been horrified at the idea of a pipe or cigar between feminine lips, and cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be whispered that here and there a lady who is usually considered dreadfully fast for her pains was accustomed to venture upon a cigarette. In Puck, 1870, Weida represented one of her beautiful young men, Vi Bruce, as murmuring idolist nonsense to Lillian Lee as he lighted one of his cigarettes for her use, but Lillian Lee was a coquette. An amusing incident is related in Forster's Life of Dickens which shows how entirely unknown was smoking among women at the middle and upper classes in England, some 10 years after Queen Victoria came to the throne. Dickens was at Lausanne and Geneva in the autumn of 1846. As hotel in Geneva, he met a remarkable mother and daughter both English who admired him greatly and whom he had previously known in Genoa. The younger ladies' conversation would have shocked the primates and matrons of that day. She asked Dickens if he had ever read such infernal trash as Mrs. Gores and exclaimed, Oh God, what a sermon we had here last Sunday. Dickens and his two daughters, who were decidedly in the way as we agreed afterwards, dined by invitation with the mother and daughter. The daughter asked him if he smoked. Yes, said Dickens, I generally take a cigar after dinner when I'm alone. Thereupon said the young lady, I'll give you a good one when we go upstairs, but the sequel must be told in the novelist's own inimitable style. Well, sir, he wrote, in due course we went upstairs and there we were joined by an American lady residing in the same hotel. Also a daughter, American lady married at 16, American daughter, 16 now, often mistaken for sisters, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When that was over, the younger of our entertainers brought out a cigar box and gave me a cigar made of negro head, she said, which would quell an elephant six whiffs. The box is full of cigarettes. Good, large ones made a pretty strong tobacco. I always smoked them here and used to smoke them at Genoa and I knew them well. When I lighted my cigar, daughter lighted hers at mine, leaned against the mantelpiece in conversation with me, put out her stomach, folded her arms and with her pretty face cocked up sideways and her cigarette smoking away like a Manchester cotton mill, laughed and talked and smoked in the most gentlemanly manner I ever beheld. Mother immediately lighted her cigar, American lady immediately lighted hers and in five minutes the room was a cloud of smoke, with us four in the center pulling away bravely while American lady related stories of her hookah upstairs and described different kinds of pipes, but even this was not all. For presently, two Frenchmen came in with whom and the American lady daughter sat down to whisk. The Frenchmen smoked of course, they were really modest gentlemen and seemed dismayed and daughter played for the next hour or two with the cigar continually in her mouth, never out of it. She certainly smoked six or eight. Mother gave in soon, I think she only did it out of vanity. American lady had been smoking all the morning, I took no more and daughter and the Frenchmen had it all to themselves. Conceived this in a great hotel with not only their own servants, but half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and out. I showed no Adam a surprise, but I never was so surprised. So ridiculously taken aback in my life for in all my experience of ladies of one kind in another, I never saw a woman, not a basket woman or a gypsy smoked before. This last remark is highly significant. Forster says that Dickens live to have a larger and wider experience, but there was enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described. The words cigar and cigarette are used indifferently by the novelist, but it seems clear from the description and from the number of smoked by the lady in an hour or two that it was a cigarette and not a cigar, probably so-called, which was never out of her mouth. The ladies who so surprised Dickens were English and American, but at the period in question, the early forties of the last century, one of the freaks of fashion at Paris was the giving of luncheon parties for ladies only, at which cigars were handed round. The first hints of feminine smoking in England may be traced like so many other changes in fashion in the pages of punch. In 1851, steady-going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived outburst of bloomerism imported from the United States. Of course, it wasn't once suggested the women who would go so far as to emulate masculine attire and to emancipate themselves from the usual conventions of feminine dress would naturally seek to imitate men in other ways also. Leach had a picture of a quiet smoke and punch, which depicted five ladies in short, wide skirts and bloomers in a tobacco-ness shop, two smoking cigars and one of pipe, while one of the inferior animals behind the counter was selling tobacco, but this was satire and hardly had much relation to fact. It was not until the 60s of the last century that cigarette smoking by women began to creep in. Warner McCollins, writing in 1869 in a curious outburst against the use of tobacco by young men, said, when one hears of sly cigarettes between feminine lips at croquet parties, there is no more to be said. Since that date, cigarette smoking has become increasingly popular among women and the term sly has long ceased to be applicable. Punch's pocketbook for 1878 had an amusing skit on a lady's reading party to which Mr. Punch acted as coach. After breakfast, the reading ladies lounged on the lawn of cigarettes. But Queen Victoria, who hated tobacco and banished it from her presence and from her abodes as far as she could, would have thought and said, of the extent to which cigarette smoking is indulged in now by women, is a question quite unanswerable. Yet Queen Victoria once received a present of pipes and tobacco. By the hands of Sir Richard Burton, the queen had sent a damasked tent, a silver pipe and two silver trays to the king of Dahomey. That potentate told Sir Richard that the tent was very handsome but too small, that the silver pipe did not smoke so well as sold red clay with a wooden stem, and that, though he liked the trays very much, he thought them hardly large enough to serve as shields. He hoped that the next gifts would include a carriage and a pair and a white woman, both of which he would appreciate very much. However, he sent gifts in return to her botanic majesty and among them were a West African state umbrella, a selection of highly colored clothing materials and some native pipes and tobacco for the queen to smoke. Many royal ladies of Europe, the contemporaries of Queen Victoria and her son have had the reputation of being confirmed smokers. Among them may be named Carmen Silva the Poetess, Queen of Romania, the dowager Sarita of Russia, the late Empress of Austria, King Alfonso's mother, formerly Queen Regent of Spain, the dowager Queen Margarita of Italy, and ex-Queen Amelie of Portugal. It is of course well known that Austrian and Russian ladies generally are fond of cigarette smoking. On Russian railways it is not unusual to find a compartment labeled for ladies who do not smoke. The newspapers reported not long ago from the other side of the Atlantic that the smart women of Chicago had substituted cigars for cigarettes. According to an interview with the Chicago Hotel Proprietor, the fairest smokers select their cigars as men do, either black and strong or light according to taste. How in the world else could they select them? It is not likely however that cigar smoking will become popular among women. For one thing it leaves too strong and too clinging and odor on the clothes. One of the latest announcements however in the fashion pages of the newspapers is the advent of smoking jackets for ladies. We are informed in the usual style of such pages that the well-dressed woman has begun to consider the little smoking jacket indispensable. This jacket we are told is a very different matter to the braided velvet coats which were done by our masculine forebears in the days of long drooping cavalry mustaches, tally-buttoned frock coats and flexible canes. Feminine smoking jacket of today is worn with entrancing little evening or semi-evening frocks and represents a compromise between a cloak and a coat being exquisitely draped in fashion of the softest and most attractive of the season's beautiful fabrics. There are still many good people nowadays who are shocked at the idea of women smoking and to them may be commended the common sense words of Bishop Boyd Carpenter formerly of Rippon who arrived in New York early in 1913 to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard University. The American newspapers reported him as saying with reference to this subject many women in England who are well thought of smoke. I do not attempt to enter into the ethical part of this matter, but this much I say if men find it such a pleasure to smoke why shouldn't women? There are many colors in the rainbow so there are many tastes in people but maybe a pleasure to men may be given to women when we find women smoking as they do in some branches of society today the mere pleasure of that habit must be accepted as belonging to both sexes. End of chapter 13. Chapter 14 of the Social History of Smoking This is a Labour Vax recording our Labour Vax recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteers please visit LabourVax.org recording by Ion Hattley The Social History of Smoking by G. L. Apperson I. S. O. Chapter 14 Smoking in Church For thine sake tobacco I'd do anything but die. Charles Lamb farewell to tobacco. The use of tobacco in churches forms a curious, it's short chapter in the Social History of Smoking. The earliest reference to sex of practice occurs in 1590 when Pope Innocent VII has communicated all sex persons as were found taking snuff or using tobacco in any form in the church of St. Peter at Rome. And again in 1624 Pope Urban VIII issued a war against the use of tobacco in churches. In England it would seem as if some of the early smokers and the foreigners had their enthusiasm for the new indulgence and went so far as to smoke in church. When King James I was about to visit Cambridge the vice chancellor of the university put forth sundry regulations in connection with the royal visit in which may be found the final impasses that no graduate, scholar or student of this university presumed to resort to any end, tavern, alehouse, or tobacco shop at any time during the bold of his majesty here. Nor do presumed to take tobacco in St. Mary's Church or in Trinity College Hall upon paying a final expanse to the university. Evidently, the intention was to make things present for the royal foe, a tobacco, during his visit. It would appear to be a fair inference from the wording of this prohibition that when the King was nine at Cambridge graduates and scholars and students could resume their liberty to resort to ends, taverns, alehouses, and tobacco shops and presumably to take tobacco in St. Mary's Church without question. The prohibition in the regulating quote that is smoking in St. Mary's Church referred, it may be noted, to the act which was held therein. Candidates for degrees or graduates to display their proficiency publicly maintain these. This performance was termed keeping or holding an act. It is, of course, conceivable that the prohibition so far as the church in Trinity College Hall were concerned was against the taking of snuff rather than smoking. But the phrase to take tobacco was at that time quite commonly upon to smoking. And considering that extraordinary and inmoderate use of tobacco soon after its introduction, it's not in the least incredible that points were at least occasionally even in sacred buildings. Sometimes tobacco is used in church for disinfectant or deodorizing purposes. The church wardens accounts of St. Peter's Barn Staple for a 1741 containment entry paid for tobacco and frankincense burdened the church to seven stakes pence. Sprigs of juniper, pits, and sweetwood in combination with incense were often used for the same purpose. Smoking, it may be safely asserted, was never practiced commonly in English churches. Even in our own day people have been served smoking not during the service time but in passing through the building. In church, in some of the South American states, and they are home in Holland, but in England such a creation has been occasional, only and quite exceptional. One need not be surprised at any instance of lack of reverence in English churches during the 18th century, and a few instances can be given of church smoking in that era. Brackburn, Archbishop of York, was a great smoker. On one occasion he was at St. Mary's Church, Nine and Ham, for a confirmation. The story of what happened was told long afterwards in a letter written in December 1773 by John Disney. Rector is Shwinda Berry, Lincoln Sire, the grandson of the Mister Disney who at the time of the Archbishop's visit to St. Mary's was incumbent of that church. This letter was addressed to James Granger and was published in Granger's Correspondence. The antidote, which Minson wrote the Mister Disney of Shwinda Berry is, I believe, incredibly true. The fairer happened in St. Mary's Church at Nine and Ham when Archbishop Brackburn of York was there on a visitation. The Archbishop had ordered some of the operators or other attendants to bring him pipes and tobacco and some liquor into the vatsry for his refreshment after the fatigue of confirmation. And this come into Mister Disney's ears if obeyed them being brought to there and with a becoming remistrated with the Archbishop upon the impurity of his conduct at the same time telling his grace that his vetsries should not be converted into a smoking room. Another 18th century clerical worthy, the famous Dr. Parr, an inveterate smoker was accustomed to do what Mister Disney prevented Archbishop Brackburn from doing. He smoked in his vetsry at Hatten. This he did before the sermon while the congregation were singing a hymn. And apparently both parties were pleased for Parr would say, my people like long hymns but I prefer a long clay. Robert Hall, the famous bandit's preacher having once upon a time strongly denounced smoking as an oddidious custom, learned to smoke himself as a result of his acquaintance with Dr. Parr. Parr was such a continuous smoker that anyone who came into his company if he had never smoked before had to learn the use of pipe as a means of self-defense. Hall, he became a heavy smoker, he said to have smoked in his vetsry at intervals in the service. He probably found some relief in tobacco from this severe internal pain switch for many years he was afflicted. Mr. Ditchfield, in his entertaining book on the Parr's Clerk, tells a story of a Lincoln-Sire curate who was a great smoker and who, like Parr, was a cutsome to retire to the vetsry before the sermon. And there smoked a pipe while the congregation sang a song. One Sunday, says Mr. Ditchfield, he earned a natural pipe and Joshua, the clerk, told him that the people were getting impatient. Them singing another song, say, the curate. They have served by the clerk. Then let them sing the 119th by the curate. At last he had finished the pipe and began to put on the black gown, but his foes were troublesome and he could not get it on. I think that that was in the gown, whether it was the curate. I think he'd be driving by Joe Joshua. The same writer, in his commanding volume on the old-time partisan, mentions that the vicar of Conrington in 1692 found that it was as a customary for people to play cards on the communion table and that, when they chose the church wardens, he used to sit in on the sanctuary smoking and drinking. The clerk gravely sang when the pipe in his mouth that says had been their custom for the last sixty years. Although probably the conduct of the Conrington Parsoners was unusual, it is certain that in the 17th century smoking at meetings held, not in the church itself, but in the vet street, was common. The church wardens' accounts of St. Mary's lyre chest, or 1665 through 1666, recorded in the espinature and bearing tobacco from Fertsalat's seven ceilings, ten pints. In those of St. Alfred's, Lundrual, for St. 171, there are the entries for pipes and tobaccos in the vet street, two ceilings, and for a gross of pipes at several times two ceilings. In the next century, however, the practice was modified. The St. Alfred's accounts for 1739 at the entry ordered that there be no smoking nor drinking for the future in the vet street room during the time business is doing, on pain of forfeiting wind-sailing, and since then they expected. From this it was seen fair to infer, one, that there was no objection to the lights and pipes in the vet street after the business of the meeting had been transacted, and two, that on a since then day for some inscrutable reason, there is no prohibition at all of smoking and drinking. Readers of Sirwater Sky will remember in the heart of Bindelofen, one carriage-sentence, of eighteenth-century smoking-in-church, and the Skynet's Presbyterian Church, too. Ginny Dean's beloved Ruben Butler was about to be ordained to the charge of the periods of night or light, Dumbarton Sire. His congregation were duly seated after prayers. To his David Dean's acupuncturist among the elders in the fissading minister, and read his text preparatory to the delivery of his hour, in a quarter sermon, the redoubtable Duncan of Knockdunder was making his preparations also for the sermon. After rummaging the Leathernpert which sung in front of his petticoat, he reproduced a short tobacco pipe made of iron, and observed almost a lot. I had forgotten my spooktons, like so. Dunged down into the clinking and bring me up a penny worth of twist. Six arms, the next within reach, presented with an obedient start, and as many tobacco pouches to the man of office. He made choice of one with a none of acknowledgement. Filled his pipe, like to do it with the assistance of his spitzer flint, and smoked with infinite composure during the whole time of the sermon. When the discourse was finished, he knocked the axes out of his pipe, repressed it in his sporad, returned the tobacco pouch or splints into its owner, and joined in the prayers with decency and attention. David Dean's habit did not at all improve this irreverence. It did not become a wild Indian, he said, much as a Christian and a gentleman to sit in the Kirk, puffin' tobacco rake, as if he were a change house. The date of the incident was 1737, but rather Sir Walter Scott had any authority in the fact for this terroristic performance of knock-dunner or not. It is certain that any such occurrence in the Scotts Kirk must have been extremely rare. Knock-dunner's pipe, according to Scott, was made of iron. This was an infrequent material for tobacco pipes, but there are a few examples in museums. In the Belfast Museum, there is a cat-siren tobacco pipe about 18 inches long, the ball of a brass pipe, and a pipe about six inches in length, made of seed iron. Another 18th century instance of smoking in church, taken from historical fact, and not from fiction, is associated with the church's phase in middle six. The parish resisters of that village bear witness to repeated disputes between the parish and bell ringers, and the parish nurse, generally in 1748 to 1754. In 1752 it was noted that sermon had been preached after a funeral to a noisy congregation. On another occasion, says the register, the ringers and other inhabitants disturbed the service from the beginning of the prayers to the end of the sermon, but ringing the bells and going into the gallery to spit below. While at another time, a fellow came into church with a pot of beer and a pipe, and remained smoking in his own pew into the end of the sermon. Going to church that phase in those days must have been quite an assigning experience. No one knew what might happen next. In the remote ingrates and wells, parishes, men seemed 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 lifeful book, 40 Years in the Moreland Parish, tells how when he first went to Danby and Clavin, then very remote from the great world, and had to take his first funeral, he found inside the church the Parrots' Clerk, who was also Parrot's schoolmaster, by the way, sent him the sunny embracer of the wedge window with his hat on and can't re-smoke in this pipe. A correspondent of the Times in 1895, it's in that his mother had told him, as he remembers seeing smoking in a welch's church about 1850. The communion table stood, dial, and the farmers were in the habit of putting their hats upon it, and when the sermon began, they let their pipes and smoked, but without any idea of irreverence. In the access church about 1861, a visitor had pointed out to him various notes in the gallery where his short pipes were stowed away. As he was informed, the old men smoked during service, and several of the pews in the body of the church contained triangular wooden spittons filled with sodas. A clergyman has put it on record that when he went in 1873 as a curator-in-charge to an out-of-the-way Norfolk village, at his first early celebration, he arrived in the church about 745 a.m., and he says, to my amazement, saw five old men sent around the stove, and then knave with their hats on, smoked in their pipes. I had spocerated with them quite quietly, but they let the church before service and never came again. I discovered outwards that they had been regular communicants and that my predecessors are always distributed out for tory to the poor present in memory after the service. When these men, in the course of my remonstrance, found out that I was not going to continue the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants. Nowadays, it's smoking takes place in church at all. It can only be done with intentional irreverence, and it is painful to think that even at the present day there are people in whom a fan of reverence and decency is so far lacking as to lead them to desegrate practices of worship. The vicar of the lane-catcher at his Eats or Vets three meeting in 1913 complained that bank holiday visitors to the parish church who ate their lunch, smoked, and wore the hats while looking around the building. It is absurd to suppose that these people were unconscious and in pride of the other conduct. End of chapter 14. Chapter 15 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. Reading by Jason Mayoff. The Social History of Smoking by G. L. Apperson, ISO. Chapter 15, Tobaconist Signs. I would enjoin every shop to make use of a sign which bears some affinity to the wares in which it deals. Addison Spectator, April 2, 1711. Shop signs were one of the most conspicuous features of the streets of old London. In days when the numbering of houses was unknown, the use of signs was indispensable for identification and greatly must they have contributed to the quaint and picturesque appearance of the streets. Some projected far over the narrow roadway competition to attract attention and custom is no modern novelty. Some were fastened to posts or pillars in front of the houses. By the time of Charles II, the overhanging signs had become a nuisance and a danger. And in the seventh year of that king's reign, an act was passed providing that no sign should hang across the street, but that all should be fixed to the balconies or fronts or sides of houses. This act was not strictly obeyed and a large number of signs were hung over the doors. While many others were affixed to the fronts of the houses. Eventually, in the second half of the 18th century, signs gradually disappeared and the streets were numbered. There were occasional survivals which are to be found to this day, such as the barber's pole, accompanied sometimes by the brass basin of the barber surgeon, the glorified canister of a grocer or the golden leg of a hosier. And insigns have never failed us, but by the close of the 18th century, most of the old trade signs, which flaunted themselves in the streets, had disappeared. The sellers of tobacco naturally hung out their signs like other tradesfolk. Signs in their early days were no doubt chosen to intimate the trades of those who use them. And in the easygoing old fashioned days, when it was considered the right and natural thing for a son to be brought up to his father's trade and to succeed him therein, they long remained appropriate and intelligible. Later, as we shall see, they became meaningless in many cases. But in the days when tobacco smoking first came into vogue, the signs chosen naturally had some reference to the trade they indicated. And one of the earliest used was the sign of the black boy in allusion to the association of the negro with tobacco cultivation. The black boy existed as a shop sign before tobacco's triumph for Henry Machen in his diary, so early as December 30th, 1562, mentions a goldsmith dwelling at the scene of the Blake boy in the cheap. But the early sellers of tobacco soon fastened on this appropriate sign. The earliest reference to such use may be found in Ben Johnson's Bartholomew Fair, 1614, where in the first scene, Humphrey Wasp says, I thought he would have run mad of the black boy in Bucklesbury that takes the scurvy, roguy tobacco there. Later, the black boy, like other once significant signs, became meaningless and was used in connection with various trades. Early in the 18th century, a bookseller at the sign of the black boy on London Bridge was advertising Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, another bookseller traded at the black boy in Paternoster Row in 1712. Linnendrapers, Hatters, Pawnbrokers, and other tradesmen all used the same sign at various dates in the 18th century. But side by side with this indiscriminate and unnecessary use of the sign, there existed a continuous association of the black boy with the tobacco trade. A tobacconist named Millward lived at the black boy in Red Cross Street, Barbican, in 1742, and many old tobacco papers show a black boy, or sometimes two, smoking. Mr. Holden MacMichael, in his papers on the London Signs, says Mrs. Skinner of the old established tobacconists opposite the law courts in the Strand possessed, about the year 1890, two signs of the black boy appertaining, no doubt, to the old house of Messer's Skinners on Holben Hill, of the front of which there was an illustration in the archer collection in the print department of the British Museum, where the black boy and tobacco rolls are depicted outside the premises. The black boy indeed continued in use by tobacconists until the 19th century was well advanced. A tobacconist had a shop upon Wapping Wall in 1667 at the sign of the black boy and pelican. Other significant early tobacconist signs were Sir Walter Raleigh, the Virginian, and the tobacco roll. Sir Walter, as the reputed introducer of tobacco, was naturally chosen as a sign, and his portrait adorns several shop bills in the bank's collection. The American Indians represented under the figure of the Virginian and the Negroes were hopelessly confused by the early tobacconists with results which were sometimes surprising from an ethnological point of view. As the first tobacco imported into this country came from Virginia, a supposed Virginian was naturally adopted as a tobacco seller sign at an early date. An Indian or a Negro or figure which was a combination of both was commonly represented wearing a kilt or a girdle of tobacco leaves, a feathered headdress, and smoking a pipe. A tobacco paper, dating from about the time of Queen Anne, bears rudely engraved the figure of a Negro smoking and holding a roll of tobacco in his hand. Above his head is a crown, behind are two ships in full sail with the sun just appearing from the right hand corner above. The foreground shows four little black boys planting and packing tobacco, and below them is the name of the ingenious tradesman John Winkley, tobacconist near Yee Bridge in the borough Southwick. Sixty years or so ago, a wooden figure representing a Negro with a gilt loincloth and band with feathered head and sometimes with a tobacco roll was still a frequent ornament of tobacconist shops. The tobacco roll, either alone or in various combinations, was one of the commonest of early tobacconist signs and was in constant use for a couple of centuries. It may still be occasionally seen at the present time in the form of the twist with alternate brown or black and yellow coils, which up to quite a recent date was a tolerably frequent adornment of tobacconist shops, but is now rare. This roll represented what was called spun or twist tobacco. Decker, in James the First's time, speaks of roll tobacco. The youngster who mimics the stage glance in Johnson's Cynthia's Rebels as described in chapter two, anti, page 31, says that he has three sorts of tobacco in his pocket, which probably means that it was customary to mix for smoking purposes tobacco of the three usual kinds, roll or pudding, leaf and cane. One would have thought that a representation of the tobacco plant itself would have been a more natural and comprehensive sign than one particular preparation of the herb, yet representations of the plant were rare, while those of the compressed tobacco known as pudding or roll in the form of a tobacco roll, as described above, were very frequently used as signs. From the examples given in Bern's descriptive catalogue of London tokens of the 17th century, it is clear that the tobacco roll was a warm favorite. Three tobacco rolls was also used as a sign. In 1732, there was a tobacco roll in Finch Lane on the north side of Cornhill over against the Swan and Rumor Tavern. In 1766, Mrs. Flight, tobacconist, carried on her business at the tobacco roll, next door but one to St. Christopher's Church, Threadneetle Street. The shop bill of Richard Lee, who sold tobacco about 1730 at Ye Golden Tobacco Roll in Panton Street near Leicester Fields is an elaborate production. Hogarth, in the earlier periods of his career as an engraver, engraved many shop bills, and this particular bill is usually attributed to him, though the attribution has been disputed. There is a copy of the bill in the British Museum and in the catalogue of the prints and drawings in the National Collection, Mr. Stevens thus describes it, it is an oblong enclosing an oval, the spandrels being occupied by leaves of the tobacco plant tied in bundles. The above title, Richard Lee at Ye Golden Tobacco Roll in Panton Street near Leicester Fields, is on a frame which encloses the oval. Within the latter, the design represents the interior of a room, with ten gentlemen gathered near a round table on which is a bowl of punch. Several of the gentlemen are smoking tobacco in long pipes. One of them stands up on our right and vomits. Another, who is intoxicated, lies on the floor by the side of a chair. A fire of wood burns in the grate. On the wall hangs two pictures. Three men's hats hang on pegs on the wall. Altogether, this is an interesting and suggestive design, but hardly in the taste likely to commend itself to present-day tradesmen. A roll of tobacco, it may be noted, was a common form of payment to the Fleet Parsons for their scoundrel-y services. Pennant, writing in 1791, describes how these men hung out their frequent signs of a male and female hand conjoined with the legend written below, marriages performed within. Before his shop walked the parson a squalid profligate figure clad in a tattered plaid nightgown with a fiery face and ready to couple you for a dram of gin or a roll of tobacco. Combinations of the roll in tobacconist signs occur occasionally. In 1660, there was a tobacco roll in Sugarloaf at Gray's Inn Gate, Holborn. In 1659, James Barnes issued a farthing token from the Sugarloaf and three tobacco rolls in the poultry, London. The Sugarloaf was the principal grocer sign, and so when it is found in combination with the tobacco roll at this time, it may reasonably assume that the proprietor of the business was a grocer who was also a tobacconist. Before the end of the 17th century, however, the signs were ceasing to have any necessary association with the trade carried on under them, and tobacconists are found with shop signs which had no reference in any way to tobacco. For instance, to take a few examples from the late Mr. Hilton Price's lists of signs of old London from Cheapside and adjacent streets, in 1695, John Arundel, tobacconist, was at the White Horse. Wood Street, in the same year, Jay Mumford, tobacconist, was at the Falcon, Lawrence Lane. In 1699, Mr. Brutton, tobacconist, was to be found at the Three Crowns under the Royal Exchange. In 1702, Richard Bronis, tobacconist, was at the Horseshoe, Bread Street. And in 1766, Mr. Hoppy, of the oil jar, all change, Wattling Street End, advertised that he sold a newly invented phosphorus powder for lighting pipes quickly in about a half a minute. Ask for a bottle of thunder powder. Again, in Fleet Street, Mr. Townsend, tobacconist, traded in 1672 at the Three Golden Balls near St. Dunstan's Church. While at the end of Fetter Lane a few years later, John Newland, tobacconist, was to be found at the King's Head. Addison, in the 28th Spectator, April 2, 1711, took note of the severance which had taken place between sign and trader, and of the absurdity that the sign no longer had any significance. After satirizing first the monstrous conjunctions in signs of dog and gridiron, cat and fiddle, and so forth, and next the absurd custom by which young tradesmen, at their first starting in business, added their own signs to those of the masters under whom they had served their apprenticeship. The assayist goes on to say, in the third place, I would enjoin every shop to make use of a sign which bears some affinity to the wares in which it deals. What can be more inconsistent than to see a tailor at the lion, a cook should not live at the boot, nor a shoemaker at the roasted pig? Then yet for want of this regulation, I have seen a goat set up before the door of a perfumer, and the French King's head at a sword-cutler's. Notwithstanding the few examples given above, tobacconists, more than most tradesmen, seemed to have continued to use signs that had at least some relevance to their trade. Abel Drugger was a tobacco man, i.e., a tobacco seller in Ben Johnson's play of the alchemist, 1610, so that it is not very surprising to find the name used occasionally as a tobacconist sign. Toward the end of the 18th century, one Peter Coburn traded as a tobacconist at the sign of the Abel Drugger in Fenchard Street, and informed the public on the advertising papers in which he wrapped up his tobacco for customers, that he had formerly been shopman at the Sir Roger DeCoverly, a notice which has preserved the name of another tobacconist sign borrowed from literature. 17th century London signs were the three tobacco pipes, two tobacco pipes crossed, and five tobacco pipes. At Edinburgh in the 18th century, there were tobacconists who used two pipes crossed, a roll of tobacco, and two leaves over two crossed pipes, and a roll of tobacco, and three leaves. The older tobacconists were want to assert, says Larwood, that the man on the moon could enjoy his pipe, hence the man on the moon is represented on some of the tobacconist papers in the bank's collection, puffing like a steam engine, and underneath the words, who'll smoke with ye man in ye moon? The Dutch, as everyone knows, are great smokers, so a Dutchman has been a common figure on tobacconist signs. In the 18th century, a common device was three figures representing a Dutchman, a Scotchman, and a sailor, explained by the accompanying rhyme. We three are engaged in one cause, I snuffs, I smokes, and I chas. Larwood says that a tobacconist in the Kingsland Road had the three men on his sign, but with a different legend. This Indian weed is good indeed. Puff on, keep up the joke, which is the best to stand the test, either to chew or smoke. The bill bearing this sign is in bank's collection, 1750. Another in the same collection, with a similar meaning, but of more elaborate design, shows the three men, the central figure, having his hands in his pockets, and in his mouth a pipe from which smoke is rolling. The man on the left advances towards this central figure, holding out a pipe, above which is the legend, Vulvoo de rap, above the middle man, is no, this been better. The third man, on his right, holds out, also towards the central figure, a tobacco box, above which is the legend, will you have a quid? A frequent sign device among dealers in snuff was the crown and rasp. The oldest method of taking snuffs at Larwood, in the history of signboards, was to scrape it with a rasp from the dry root of the tobacco plant. The powder was then placed on the back of the hand, and so snuffed up. Hence the name of Rapé, rasped for a kind of snuff, and the common tobacconist sign of La Cahadar, the golden root in France, Rapé became an English rapé, familiar in snuff-taking days as the name for a coarse kind of snuff made from the darker and rancor tobacco leaves. The list of prices and names, given by Wimble, a snuff seller, about 1740, and printed in Fairholt's History of Tobacco, contains 18 different kinds of rapé, English, best English, fine English, high-flavored course, low, scented, composite, et cetera. The rasps for obtaining this rapé, continues Larwood, were carried in the waistcoat pocket and soon became articles of luxury, being carved in ivory and variously enriched. Some of them, in ivory and inlaid wood, may be seen at the Hotel Cluny in Paris, and an engraving of such an object that occurs in archaeology of Volume 13. One of the first snuff boxes was the so-called Rapé or Grévoise box, at the back of which was a little space for a piece of the root, whilst a small iron rasp was contained in the middle. When a pinch was wanted, the root was drawn a few times over the iron rasp, and so the snuff was produced and could be offered to a friend with much more grace than under the above-mentioned process with the pocket grater. The tobacconist sign that for very many years was in most general use was the figure of a Highlander, which may still perhaps be found in one or two places, but which was not at all an unusual sight in the streets of London and other towns some 40 or 50 years ago. Most men of middle age can remember when the snuff-taking Highlander was the usual ornament to the entrance of a tobacconist shop, but all have disappeared from London's streets save too. I say too on the authority of Mr. Evie Lucas, who gives it in his wanderer in London as the number of the survivors, but only one is known to me. This is the famous old wooden Highlander, which stood for more than 100 years on guard at a tobacconist shop in Tottenham Court Road. About the end of 1906, it was announced that the shop was to be demolished and that the time-worn figure was for sale. The announcement created no small stir and it was said that the offers for the Highlander ran up to a surprising figure. He was bought ultimately by a neighbouring furnishing firm and now stands on duty not far from his ancient post, though no passerby can help feeling the incongruity between the time-honoured emblem of the snuff-taker and his present surroundings of linoleum and sitch. Where Mr. Lucas' second survivor may be is unknown to me. Not so many years ago, a wooden Highlander as a tobacconist sign was a conspicuous figure in Knightsbridge and there was another in the Westminster Bridge Road, but Tempus Edux Ryrum has consumed them with all their brethren. In a few provincial towns, a wooden Highlander may still be found at the door of tobacco shops, but they are probably destined to early disappearance. In 1907, one still stood guard, a tall figure in full costume outside a tobacconist shop in Cheltenham and may still be there. There was a Highlander of oak in the costume of the black watch still standing, I believe in the doorway of a tobacco shop at St. Heliers, Jersey. It is traditionally said to have been originally the figurehead of a war vessel which was wrecked on the Alderney Coast. Another survivor may be seen at the door of a shop belonging to Messers Churchman, tobacco manufacturers, in Westgate Street Ipswich. A correspondent of Notes and Queries describes it as a very fine specimen in excellent condition and adds, Mr. W. Churchman informs me that it belonged to his grandfather who established the business in Ipswich in 1790 and he believed it was quite a hundred year old at the time. One of the earliest known examples of these Highlanders as tobacconist signs is that which was placed at the door of a shop in Coventry Street which was opened in 1720 under the sign the Highlander, Thistle, and Crown. This is said to have been a favorite place of resort of the Jacobites. In his nicotine and its rariora, Mr. A. M. Broadley gives the card dated 1765 of William Keb at the Highlander corner of Palmall facing St. James Haymarket and says that the Highlander was a favorite tobacconist sign for 200 years. I have been unable, however, to find evidence of such a prolonged period of favor. I know of no certain 17th century reference to the Highlander as a tobacconist sign. The figure was usually made with a snuff mull in his hand, the Highlander being always credited with a great love and a great capacity for snuff-taking, but one curious example was furnished not only with a mull but with a bat-like implement of unknown use. Mr. Arthur Denman, FSA, writing in Notes and Queries, April 17, 1909, said, I have a very neat little genuine specimen of the old tobacconist sign of a 42nd Highlander with his mull. It is three feet six inches high and it differs from those usually met with in that under the left arm is an implement almost exactly like a cricket bat. This bat has a gilt knob to the handle and on the shoulder of it are three chevrons in gold without doubt a sergeant's stripes. On the exposed side of the bat is what would appear to represent a loose strip of wood. This strip is nearly one third of the width of the instrument and extends up the middle about two-fifths of the length of the body of it. I can only guess that the bat was at some time primarily an emblem of a sergeant's office and secondarily used for the infliction of chastisement on clumsy or disorderly recruits and perhaps it was equivalent to the gel of German armies which sergeants drove lacking warriors into the fray. But is there any record of such an accoutrement as being that of a sergeant in the British army and what was the purpose of the loose strip unless it was to cause the blow administered to resound as much as to hurt as does the wand of Harlequin in a booth? These questions receive no answers from the learned correspondence of the most useful and omniscient of weekly papers. Personally, I much doubt Mr. Denman suggested explanations of his Highlander's curious implement. There was no evidence that a sergeant in the British army ever carried a cricket bat-like implement either as a sign of office or to be used for disciplinary or punitive purposes like the canes of the German sergeants of long ago. It would seem to be more likely that this particular figure was of unusual perhaps unique make and had some special local or individual significance wherever or for whom it was first made and used which has now been forgotten. After the suppression of the Jacobite uprising in 1745 the English government made war on Scottish nationality and among other measures, the wearing of the Highland dress was forbidden by Parliament. On this occasion, the following paragraph appeared of the newspapers of the time. We hear that the dapper wooden Highlanders who guard so heroically the doors of snuff shops intend to petition the legislature in order that they may be excused from complying with the act of Parliament with regard to their change of dress, alleging that they have ever been faithful subjects to His Majesty, having constantly supplied His guards with a pinch out of their mulls when they marched by them and so far from engaging in any rebellion that they have never entertained a rebellious thought once they humbly hope that they shall not be put to the expense of buying new clothes. This is not a very humorous production but at least it bears witness to the common occurrence in 1746 of the Highlanders' figure at the shops of snuff and tobacco sellers. The Highlander, as he existed within living memory at many shop doors and as he still exists at a few, was and is the survivor of many similar wooden figures as trade signs. The wooden figure of a Negro or Indian with a gilt loincloth and feathered head has already been mentioned as an old tobacconist sign. In early Georgian days, a tobacconist named John Bowden, who dealt in all kinds of snuff and also in aloe, pigtail, and wild tobacco with all sorts of perfumers, goods, wholesale, and retail, traded at the sign of the Highlander and Black Boy in Threadneedle Street, London. At York in this present year 1914, I came upon a brightly painted wooden figure of Napoleon in full uniform and snuff box in hand, standing at the door of a small tobacco shop. Another class of sign or emblem was represented by the wooden midshipmen, which many of us have seen in Leadon Hall Street, and which Dickens made famous in Dombie and Son. Sometimes the wooden figure of a sailor stood outside public houses with such signs as the Jolly Sailor, and a black doll was long a familiar token of the lowly shop kept by the tradesmen, mysteriously known as Marine Store Dealers. Images of this kind sometimes stood at the door, or in many cases were placed on brackets or swung from the lintels. Sir Walter Scott said that in London a scotchman would walk half a mile farther to purchase his ounce of snuff where the sign of the Highlander announced a North Briton. Dickens's little figure, which adorned old Saul Gilles' shop, quote, thrust itself out above the pavement, right leg foremost, end quote, with shoe-buckles and flapped waistcoat very much unlike the real thing, and, quote, bore at its right eye the most offensively disproportionate piece of machinery, end quote. But this was only one of many, quote, little timber midshipmen in obsolete naval uniforms eternally employed outside the shop doors of nautical instrument makers in taking observations of the hackney coaches, end quote. All have disappeared together with the black dolls of the rag-shops and many other old-time figures. A stray Highlander or two or other figure may survive here and there, but with very few exceptions indeed, the once-abundant tobacconist's signs have disappeared from our streets as completely as the emblems and tokens of other trades. End of Chapter 15, End of The Social History of Smoking by George L. Apperson.