Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 3: Many good folk would seem to have associated smoking with idling. In the rules of the Grammar School at Chigwell, Essex, which was founded in 1629, it is prescribed that "the Master must be a man of sound religion, neither a Papist nor a Puritan, of a grave behaviour, and sober and honest conversation, no tippler or haunter of alehouses, no puffer of tobacco." A worthy Derbyshire man named Campbell, in his will dated 20 October 1616, left all his household goods to his son, "on this condition that yf at any time hereafter, any of his brothers or sisters shall fynd him takeing of tobacco, that then he or she so fynding him, shall have the said goods"—a testamentary arrangement which suggests to the fancy some amusing strategic evasions and manœuvres on the part of the conditional legatee and his watchful relations.
From Chapter 8: Parr was not a model smoker. He was brutally overbearing towards other folk, and would accept no invitation except on the understanding that he might smoke when and where he liked. It was his invariable practice, wherever he might be visiting, to smoke a pipe as soon as he had got out of bed. His biographer says—"The ladies were obliged to bear his tobacco, or to give up his company; and at Hatton (1786-1825) now and then he was the tyrant of the fireside." Parr was capable of smoking twenty pipes in an evening, and described himself as "rolling volcanic fumes of tobacco to the ceiling" while he worked at his desk. At a dinner which was given at Trinity College, Cambridge, to the Duke of Gloucester, as Chancellor of the University, when the cloth was removed, Parr at once started his pipe and began, says one who was present, "blowing a cloud into the faces of his neighbours, much to their annoyance, and causing royalty to sneeze by the stimulating stench of mundungus." It is surprising that people were willing to put up with such bad manners as Parr was accustomed to exhibit; but his reputation was then great, and he traded upon it.
|