Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Even so late as 1861 the attitude towards smoking was still much the same in some quarters. In that year a German scholar, Professor Franz von Holtzendorff, paid a visit to a country gentleman's house in Gloucestershire—Hardwicke Court. Later he printed an account of his experiences, a translation of which was published in this country in 1878. When the professor arrived, his host, the first greeting over, at once pointed out to him a secluded apartment—the one which he thought it most important for a German to know, namely, the smoking-room. "According to his idea," continued the professor, "every German has three national characteristics, smoking, singing, and Sabbath-breaking; the first and only idea in which I found him led astray by an abstract theory." Later, his hostess, explaining to him the method and routine of life in an English country-house, said that the ladies retired about eleven, while the gentlemen finished their day's work in the smoking-room—the secluded apartment—or enjoyed a cigar at the billiard-table; but a smoke in the billiard-room was only allowed if that room was not near the drawing-room or in the hall close by. "You must have often been surprised," she continued, "that we English ladies have such an invincible repugnance to tobacco smoke, but there is no dispensation from our rule of abstinence, except in those rooms which my husband has already pointed out to you."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

Laurence Oliphant, who was both a man of letters and a man of fashion, is generally credited with the introduction into English society of the cigarette; but it is difficult to suggest even an approximate date. Writing from Boulogne to W.H. Wills in September 1854, Dickens says, "I have nearly exhausted the cigarettes I brought here," and proceeds to give directions for some to be sent to him from London. This is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette-smoking in England; but it is possible that by "cigarettes" Dickens meant not what we now know as such, but simply small cigars. Mr. H.M. Hyndman, in his "Record of an Adventurous Life," says that when he was living as a pupil, about the year 1860, with the Rector of Oxburgh, his fellow-pupils included "Edward Abbott of Salonica, who, poor fellow, was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings at the beginning of the Turco-Servian War. Cigarette-smoking, now so popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself, was the first devotee of this habit I encountered."

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