Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Perhaps the most absurd and unmeaning of the restrictions that remain, is that which at certain times and in certain places admits the smoking of cigars and cigarettes and forbids the smoking of pipes. The idea appears to be that a pipe is vulgar. There are few restaurants now in which smoking is not allowed after dinner; but the understanding is that cigars and cigarettes only shall be smoked. In some places of resort there are notices exhibited which specifically prohibit the smoking of pipes. Why? At a smoking concert where few pipes are smoked, anyone looking

Athwart the smoke of burning weeds
can at once realize how much greater is the volume of smoke from cigars and cigarettes than would result from the smoking of a like number of pipes. It cannot, therefore, be that pipes are barred because of a supposed greater effect upon the atmosphere of the room. The only conclusion the observer can come to is, that the fashionable attitude towards pipes is one of the last relics of the old social attitude—the attitude of Georgian and Early Victorian days—towards smoking of any kind. The cigar and the cigarette were first introduced among the upper classes of society, and their use has spread downward. They have broken down many barriers, and in many places, and under many and divers conditions, the pipe has followed triumphantly in their wake; but the last ditch of the old prejudice has been found in the convention, which, in certain places and at certain times, admits the cigar and cigarette of fashionable origin, but bars the entry of the plebeian pipe—the pipe which for two centuries was practically the only mode of smoking used or known.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

Even children seem to have smoked sometimes in the coffee-houses. Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary, tells a strange story. He declares that, one evening which he spent with his brother at Garraway's Coffee-house, February 20, 1702, he was surprised to see his brother's "sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco and smoke it as audfarandly as a man of three score; after that a second and a third pipe without the least concern, as it is said to have done above a year ago." A child of two years of age smoking three pipes in succession is a picture a little difficult to accept as true. As this is the only reference to tobacco in the whole of his "Diary," it is not likely that Thoresby was himself a smoker.

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