Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

The professor, after luncheon, was pressed by the squire—"who, on any other occasion would never waste time in smoking, and only filled his short clay pipe at the end of his day's work"—to come to his smoking-room. As regards this room the professor drily remarked—"I thought I had noticed that even the key-hole was stopped up, in order to preserve the ladies' delicate nerves from every disagreeable sensation." After dinner, again, when the ladies had left the table, "the gentlemen passed the bottles of port, sherry, and claret, with the regularity of planets from hand to hand," but no one dreamed of smoking. That was reserved for the secluded apartment after the ladies had gone to bed. Neither host nor guest imagined what a revolution another generation or so would make in these social habits.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The history of smoking by women through Victorian days need not detain us long. There have always been pipe-smokers among the women of the poorer classes. Up to the middle of the last century smoking was very common among the hard-working women of Northumberland and the Scottish border. Nor has the practice by any means yet died out. In May 1913, a woman, who was charged with drunkenness at the West Ham police court, laid the blame for her condition on her pipe. She said she had smoked it for twenty years, and "it always makes me giddy!" The writer, in August 1913, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.

It is not so very long ago that an English traveller heard a working-man courteously ask a Scottish fish-wife, who had entered a smoking-compartment of the train, whether she objected to smoking. The good woman slowly produced a well-seasoned "cutty" pipe, and as she began to cut up a "fill" from a rank-smelling tobacco, replied: "Na, na, laddie, I've come in here for a smoke ma'sel."

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