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: It may be noted, by the way, that the gallant had no hesitation about smoking in the presence of ladies. Gostanzo, in Chapman's "All Fools," 1605, says: And for discourse in my fair mistress's presence I did not, as you barren gallants do, Fill my discourses up drinking tobacco. And in Ben Jonson's "Every Man out of his Humour," 1600, Fastidious Brisk, "a neat, spruce, affecting courtier," smokes while he talks to his mistress. A feather-headed gallant, when in the presence of ladies, often found himself, like others of his tribe of later date, gravelled for lack of matter for conversation, and the puffing of tobacco-smoke helped to occupy the pauses. When our gallant went to the theatre he loved to occupy one of the stools at the side of the stage. There he could sit and smoke and embarrass the actors with his audible criticisms of play and players.
From Chapter 8: When Tennyson was an undergraduate at Cambridge, 1828-30, he and his companions all smoked. At the meetings of the "Apostles"—the little group of friends which included the future Laureate—"much coffee was drunk, much tobacco smoked." Dons smoked as well as undergraduates. At Queens', the Combination-room in Tennyson's time had still a sanded floor, and the "table was set handsomely forth with long 'churchwardens'"—as the poet told Palgrave when the two visited Cambridge in 1859. George Pryme, in his "Autobiographic Recollections," 1870, states that in 1800 " smoking was allowed in the Trinity Combination-room after supper in the twelve days of Christmas, when a few old men availed themselves of it," which looks as if tobacco were not very popular just then at Trinity. With the wine, pipes and the large silver tobacco-box were laid on the table. Porson, when asked for an inscription for the box, suggested Pryme says that among the undergraduates, of whom he was one, tobacco had no favour, and "an attempt of Mr. Ginkell, son of Lord Athlone ... to introduce smoking at his own wine-parties failed, although he had the prestige of being a hat-fellow-commoner."
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