Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

"A Tobacco-Seller," says Earle, "is the onely man that findes good in it which others brag of, but do not; for it is meate, drinke, and clothes to him. No man opens his ware with greater seriousnesse, or challenges your judgement more in the approbation. His shop is the Randevous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses, and their communication is smoake. It is the place onely where Spaine is commended, and prefer'd before England itselfe. He should be well experienc'd in the world: for he ha's daily tryall of mens nostrils, and none is better acquainted with humors. Hee is the piecing commonly of some other trade which is bawde to his Tobacco, and that to his wife, which is the flame that follows this smoke."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The ladies who so surprised Dickens were English and American, but at the period in question-the early 'forties of the last century-one of the freaks of fashion at Paris was the giving of luncheon parties for ladies only, at which cigars were handed round.

The first hints of feminine smoking in England may be traced, like so many other changes in fashion, in the pages of Punch. In 1851, steady-going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived outburst of "bloomerism," imported from the United States. Of course it was at once suggested that women who would go so far as to imitate masculine attire and to emancipate themselves from the usual conventions of feminine dress, would naturally seek to imitate men in other ways also. Leech had a picture of "A Quiet Smoke" in Punch, which depicted five ladies in short wide skirts and "bloomers" in a tobacconist's shop, two smoking cigars and one a pipe, while "one of the inferior animals" behind the counter was selling tobacco. But this was satire and hardly had much relation to fact.

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