Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

There is ample evidence, apart from Johnson's dictum, that in the latter part of the eighteenth century smoking had "gone out." In Mrs. Climenson's "Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Lybbe Powys," we hear of a bundle of papers at Hardwick House, near Whitchurch, Oxon, which bears the unvarnished title "Dick's Debts." This Dick was a Captain Richard Powys who had a commission in the Guards, and died at the early age of twenty-six in the year 1768. This list of debts, it appears, gives "the most complete catalogue of the expenses of a dandy of the Court of George II, consisting chiefly of swords, buckles, lace, Valenciennes and point d'Espagne, gold and amber-headed canes, tavern bills and chair hire." But in all the ample detail of Captain Powys's list of extravagances there is nothing directly or indirectly relating to smoking. The beaux of the time did not smoke.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

Although, according to M. Misson, the women of Devon and Cornwall might wonder why the women of Middlesex did not take tobacco, it is certain that London and its neighbourhood did contain at least a few female smokers. Tom Brown, often dubbed "the facetious," but to whom a sterner epithet might well be applied, writing about the end of the seventeenth century, mentions a vintner's wife who, having "made her pile," as might be said nowadays, retires to a little country-house at Hampstead, where she drinks sack too plentifully, smokes tobacco in an elbow-chair, and snores away the remainder of her life. And the same writer was responsible for a satirical letter "to an Old Lady that smoak'd Tobacco," which shows that the practice was not general, for the letter begins: "Madam, Tho' the ill-natur'd world censures you for smoaking." Brown advised her to continue the "innocent diversion" because, first, it was good for the toothache, "the constant persecutor of old ladies," and, secondly, it was a great help to meditation, "which is the reason, I suppose," he continues, "that recommends it to your parsons; the generality of whom can no more write a sermon without a pipe in their mouths, than a concordance in their hands."

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