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 2: Hentzner, the German traveller, who visited London in 1598, speaks of smoking being customary among the audience at plays, who were also supplied with "fruits, such as apples, pears and nuts, according to the season, carried about to be sold, as well as ale and wine." He was struck with the universal prevalence of the tobacco-habit. Not only at plays, but "everywhere else," he says, the "English are constantly smoking tobacco," and then he proceeds to describe how they did it: "They have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the further end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder; and putting fire to it, they draw the smoak into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it plenty of phlegm and defluxions from the head." This suggests that the unpleasant and quite unnecessary habit of spitting was common with these early smokers, a suggestion which is amply supported by other contemporary evidence.
From Chapter 8: In the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century smoking reached its nadir. No dandy smoked. If some witnesses may be believed smoking had almost died out even at Oxford. Archdeacon Denison wrote in his "Memories"—"When I went up to Oxford, 1823-24, there were two things unknown in Christ Church, and I believe very generally in Oxford— smoking and slang"; but one cannot help fancying that the archdeacon's memory was not quite trustworthy. It is difficult to imagine that there was ever a time when the slang of the day was not current on the lips of young Oxford, or that so long as tobacco was procurable it did not find its way into college rooms.
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