Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

The examples and illustrations which have been given so far in this chapter relate to tradesmen and merchants, country gentlemen and the clergy. Other professional men smoked—we read in Fielding's "Amelia" of a doctor who in the evening "smoked his pillow-pipe, as the phrase is"—and among the rest of the people of equal or lower social standing smoking was as generally practised as in the preceding century. Handel, I may note, enjoyed his pipe. Dr. Burney, when a schoolboy at Chester, was "extremely curious to see so extraordinary a man," so when Handel went through that city in 1741 on his way to Ireland, young Burney "watched him narrowly as long as he remained in Chester," and among other things, had the felicity of seeing the great man "smoke a pipe, over a dish of coffee, at the Exchange Coffee-house," which was under the old Town Hall that stood opposite the present King's School, and in front of the present Town Hall.

Gonzales, in his "Voyage to Great Britain," 1731, says that the use of tobacco was "very universal, and indeed not improper for so moist a climate." He tells us that though the taverns were very numerous yet the ale-houses were much more so. These ale-houses were visited by the inferior tradesmen, mechanics, journeymen, porters, coachmen, carmen, servants, and others whose pockets were not equal to the price of a glass of wine, which, apparently, was the more usual thing to call for at a tavern, properly so called. In the ale-house men of the various classes and occupations enumerated, says the traveller, would "sit promiscuously in common dirty rooms, with large fires, and clouds of tobacco, where one that is not used to them can scarce breathe or see."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Some sigh for this and that
My wishes don't go far;
The world may wag at will,
So I have my cigar.
- Thomas Hood.

The revival of smoking among those who were most amenable to the dictates of fashion, and among whom consequently tobacco had long been in bad odour, came by way of the cigar.

In the preceding chapters all the references to and illustrations of smoking have been concerned with pipes. Until the early years of the nineteenth century the use of cigars was practically unknown in this country. The earliest notices of cigars in English books occur in accounts of travel in Spain and Portugal, and in the Spanish Colonies, and in such notices the phonetic spelling of "segar" often occurs. A few folk still cling to this spelling—there was a "segar-shop" in the Strand till quite recently, and I saw the notice "segars" the other day over a small tobacco-shop in York—which has no authority, and on etymological grounds is indefensible. The derivation of "cigar" is not altogether clear; but the probabilities are strongly in favour of its connexion with "cigarra," the Spanish name for the cicada, the shrilly-chirping insect familiar in the southern countries of Europe, and the subject of frequent allusions by the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, as well as by modern scribes. A Spanish lexicographer of authority says that the cigar has the form of a "cicada" of paper, and, on the whole, it is highly probable that the likeness of the roll of tobacco-leaf to the cylindrical body of the insect (cigarra) was the reason that the "cigarro" was so called. There is no warrant of any kind for "segar."

From The earliest mention of cigars in English occurs in a book dated 1735. A traveller in Spanish America, named Cockburn, whose narrative was published in that year, describes how he met three friars at Nicaragua, who, he says, "gave us some Seegars to smoke ... these are Leaves of tobacco rolled up in such Manner that they serve both for a Pipe and Tobacco itself ... they know no other way here, for there is no such Thing as a Tobacco-Pipe throughout New Spain."

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