The Social History of SmokingApperson, George Latimer
History
The Social History of Smoking
Apperson, George Latimer
Smoking
and the quaint similarity or comparison between the pipe and
Gladstone, the "Grand Old Man" when "Lapsus Calami" appeared in 1888,
is maintained throughout--
_Grows he black in his face with his labours?
Well, so does my Grand Old Pipe._
_For the sake of its excellent savour,
For the many sweet smokes of the past
My pipe keeps its hold on my favour,
Tho' now it is blackening fast._
But although many pipes were smoked at the Universities, there were
occasionally to be found odd survivals of old prejudices. Dr. Shipley,
in his recent memoir of John Willis Clark, the Cambridge Registrary,
says that even in the 'seventies of the last century there was an
elderly Don at Cambridge who once rebuked a Junior Fellow, who was
smoking a pipe in the Wilderness, with the remark, "No Christian
gentleman smokes a pipe, or if he does he smokes a cigar." The
perpetrator of this bull was the same parson who married late in life,
and returning to his church after a honeymoon of six weeks, publicly
thanked God "for _three_ weeks of unalloyed connubial bliss."
XII
SMOKING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Sweet when the morn is grey;
Sweet, when they've clear'd away
Lunch; and at close of day
Possibly sweetest.
C.S. CALVERLEY.
Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of three hundred years is
complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking
has never been so generally practised nor so smiled upon by fashion as
it is at the present time. Men in their attitude towards tobacco have
always been divisible into three classes--those who respected and
followed and obeyed the conventions of society and the dictates of
fashion, and smoked or did not smoke in accordance therewith; those
who knew those conventions but disregarded them and smoked as and what
they pleased; and those who neither knew nor cared whether such
conventions existed, or what fashion might say, but smoked as and
what, and when and where they pleased. At the present time the three
classes tend to combine into one. There are, it is true, a few
conventions and restrictions left; but they are not very strong, and
will probably disappear one of these days. There is also, of course,
and always has been, a fourth class of men, who for one reason or
another, quite apart from what fashion may say or do, do not smoke at
all.
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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