The Social History of SmokingApperson, George Latimer
History
The Social History of Smoking
Apperson, George Latimer
Smoking
There would appear to have been some smokers who disliked the
new-fangled cigars. Angelo seems, from various passages in his
"Reminiscences," to have been a smoker, and to have been very
frequently in the company of smokers, yet he could write: "There are
few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that
we are again in England, than the superiority of our stage-coaches.
There is something very exhilarating in being carried through the air
with rapidity ... considering the rate at which stage-coaches now
travel [_i.e._ in and just before 1830] ... a place on the box or
front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat. But alas!
no human enjoyment is free from alloy. A Jew pedlar or mendicant
foreigner with his cigar in his mouth, has it in his power to turn the
draft of sweet air into a cup of bitterness." Perhaps Angelo's
objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by
a "Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner," than to the cigar itself. Yet,
going on to describe a journey to Hastings, sitting "on the roof in
front" beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment
of dashing along, anecdote and jest going merrily on, "we had the
annoyance of a coxcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air
which Heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar,"
which looks as if his real objection was to _cigars_, as such.
The fashionable dislike of tobacco-smoke appears in the pages of
another descriptive writer--the once well known N.P. Willis, the
American author of many books of travel and gossip. In his
"Pencillings by the Way," writing in July 1833, Willis describes the
prevalence of smoking in Vienna among all the nationalities that
thronged that cosmopolitan capital. "It is," he says, "like a fancy
ball. Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians,
Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and stinking costumes,
promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest
observation. Every third window is a pipe-shop, and they [presumably
the pipes] show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of
the passion. Some of them are marked '200 dollars.' The streets reek
with tobacco-smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within
the Glacis. Your hotel, your café, your coach, your friend, are all
redolent of the same disgusting odour." In the following year,
describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon's in Scotland,
Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed
up and "conversation assumed a merrier cast," then "coffee and
liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more
slowly," and at eleven o'clock there was a general move to the
drawing-room. The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four
hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain
from Willis's silence on the subject--the "disgusting odour" would
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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