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 1: Perhaps the most likely scene of Raleigh's first experiments in the art of smoking was Durham House, which stood where the Adelphi Terrace and the streets between it and the Strand now stand. This was in the occupation of Sir Walter for twenty years (1583-1603), and he was probably resident there when Hariot returned from Virginia to make his report and instruct his employer in the management of a pipe. Walter Thornbury, in his "Haunted London," referring to the story of the servant throwing the ale over his smoking master, says: "There is a doubtful old legend about Raleigh's first pipe, the scene of which may be not unfairly laid at Durham House, where Raleigh lived." The ale story is mythical, but it is highly probable that Sir Walter's first pipes were smoked in Durham House. Dr. Brushfield quotes Hepworth Dixon, in "Her Majesty's Tower," as drawing "an imaginary and yet probable picture of him and his companions at a window of this very house, overlooking the 'silent highway':
From Chapter 6: Even children seem to have smoked sometimes in the coffee-houses. Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary, tells a strange story. He declares that, one evening which he spent with his brother at Garraway's Coffee-house, February 20, 1702, he was surprised to see his brother's "sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco and smoke it as audfarandly as a man of three score; after that a second and a third pipe without the least concern, as it is said to have done above a year ago." A child of two years of age smoking three pipes in succession is a picture a little difficult to accept as true. As this is the only reference to tobacco in the whole of his "Diary," it is not likely that Thoresby was himself a smoker.
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