Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

Parr is said on one occasion to have called for a pipe after taking a meal at a coaching-inn called the "Bush" at Bristol, when the waiter told him that smoking was not allowed at the Bush. Parr persisted, but the authorities at the inn were firm in their refusal to allow anything so vulgar as smoking on their premises, whereupon Parr is said to have exclaimed: "Why, man, I've smoked in the dining-room of every nobleman in England. The Duchess of Devonshire said I could smoke in every room in her house but her dressing-room, and here, in this dirty public-house of Bristol you forbid smoking! Amazing! Bring me my bill." The learned doctor exaggerated no doubt as regards the facilities given him for smoking; for it was his overbearing way not to ask for leave to smoke, but to smoke wherever he went, whether invited to do so or not; but the story shows the prejudice against smoking which was found in many places as a result of the attitude of the fashionable world towards tobacco.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

The fashionable dislike of tobacco-smoke appears in the pages of another descriptive writer—the once well known N.P. Willis, the American author of many books of travel and gossip. In his "Pencillings by the Way," writing in July 1833, Willis describes the prevalence of smoking in Vienna among all the nationalities that thronged that cosmopolitan capital. "It is," he says, "like a fancy ball. Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians, Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and stinking costumes, promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest observation. Every third window is a pipe-shop, and they [presumably the pipes] show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of the passion. Some of them are marked '200 dollars.' The streets reek with tobacco-smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within the Glacis. Your hotel, your café, your coach, your friend, are all redolent of the same disgusting odour." In the following year, describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon's in Scotland, Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed up and "conversation assumed a merrier cast," then "coffee and liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more slowly," and at eleven o'clock there was a general move to the drawing-room. The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain from Willis's silence on the subject—the "disgusting odour" would surely have disturbed him—that no single member of the large dinner-party dreamed of smoking, or, at all events, attempted to smoke.

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