Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

At a few clubs there are still some curious and rather unmeaning restrictions. A particularly absurd rule that maintains its ground here and there, is that which forbids smoking in the library of a club. What more appropriate place could there be for the thoughtful consumption of tobacco than among the books? But after due allowance has been made for a few minor restrictions of this kind, the fact remains that smoking has triumphed socially all along the line in Clubland. We have travelled far from the days when a committee man could declare that "No Gentleman smoked," to the time when, for example, the large smoking-room at Brooks's is one of the finest rooms in one of the most famous and exclusive of clubs. This splendid room in the eighteenth-century days of gambling was the "Grand Subscription Room"—the gambling room of Georgian times. It still retains two of the old gaming tables. Now this magnificent apartment, with its splendid barrelled ceiling, which a well-known architectural writer, Mr. Stanley C. Ramsey, A.R.I.B.A., describes as "probably the finest room of its kind in London," is the temple of Saint Nicotine. The strangers' smoking-room in the same club, formerly the dining-room, is another beautiful and delightfully decorated apartment. Similar transformations have been witnessed in other clubs.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

The more fashionable folk of the Restoration Era and later began to leave off if not to disdain the smoking-habit. Up to about 1700 smoking had been permitted in the public rooms at Bath, but when Nash then took charge, tobacco was banished. Public or at least fashionable taste had begun to change, and Nash correctly interpreted and led it. Sorbière, who has been quoted in the previous chapter, remarked in 1663 that "People of Quality" did not use tobacco so much as others; and towards the end of the century and in Queen Anne's time the tendency was for tobacco to go out of fashion. This did not much affect its general use; but the tendency—with exceptions, no doubt—was to restrict the use of tobacco to the clergy, to country squires, to merchants and tradesmen and to the humbler ranks of society—to limit it, in short, to the middle and lower classes of the social commonwealth as then organized. In the extraordinary record of inanity which Addison printed as the diary of a citizen in the Spectator of March 4, 1712, the devotion of the worthy retired tradesman to tobacco is emphasized. This is the kind of thing: "Monday ... Hours 10, 11 and 12 Smoaked three Pipes of Virginia ... one o'clock in the afternoon, chid Ralph for mislaying my Tobacco-Box.... Wednesday ... From One to Two Smoaked a Pipe and a half.... Friday ... From Four to Six. Went to the Coffee-house. Met Mr. Nisby there. Smoaked several Pipes."

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