Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

Says the Pipe to the Snuff-box, I can't understand
What the ladies and gentlemen see in your face,
That you are in fashion all over the land,
And I am so much fallen into disgrace.
- William Cowper.
(From a letter to the Rev. John Newton, May 28, 1782.)

"smoking has gone out," said Johnson in talk at St. Andrews, one day in 1773. "To be sure," he continued, "it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes and noses, and having the same thing done to us; yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out." Johnson did not trouble himself to think of how much the vagaries of fashion account for stranger vicissitudes in manners and customs than the rise and fall of the smoking-habit; nor did he probably foresee how slowly but surely the taste for smoking, even in the circles most influenced by fashion, would revive. Boswell tells us that although the sage himself never smoked, yet he had a high opinion of the practice as a sedative influence; and Hawkins heard him say on one occasion that insanity had grown more frequent since smoking had gone out of fashion, which shows that even Johnson could fall a victim to the post hoc propter hoc fallacy.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

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 dramatis personæ were a certain George Thresher, who sold beer and tobacco at his "shopp in Romford," and a good friend and customer of his named Elizabeth Savage, who, sad to say, was described as much given to "stronge drincke and tobacco." In the course of the trial, on June 8, 1621, Mistress Savage had to tell her tale, part of which is reported as follows:

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