Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

In a World of 1755 there is a description of a noisy, hearty, drinking, devil-may-care country gentleman, in which it is said, "he makes no scruple to take his pipe and pot at an alehouse with the very dregs of the people." In a Connoisseur of 1754 a fine gentleman from London, making a visit in a country-house, is taking his breakfast with the ladies in the afternoon, when they had their tea, for, says he, "I should infallibly have perished, had I staied in the hall, amidst the jargon of toasts and the fumes of tobacco." When Horace Walpole was staying with his father at his Norfolk country-seat, Houghton, in September 1737, Gray wrote to him from Cambridge: "You are in a confusion of wine, and roaring, and hunting, and tobacco, and, heaven be praised, you too can pretty well bear it." But Gray had no objection to tobacco. He lived at Cambridge, and the dons and residents there (as at Oxford), not to speak of the undergraduates, were as partial to their pipes as the men who went out from among them to become country parsons, and to share the country squire's liking for tobacco. Gray wrote to Warton from Cambridge in April 1749 saying: "Time will settle my conscience, time will reconcile me to this languid companion (ennui); we shall smoke, we shall tipple, we shall doze together"—a striking picture of University life in the sleepy days of the eighteenth century. Gray's testimony by no means stands alone. In November 1730 Roger North wrote to his son Montague, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, saying: "I would be loath you should confirm the scandal charged upon the universities of learning chiefly to smoke and to drink."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

About the time that Lang's article was written, Sir F.C. Burnand's burlesque, "Bluebeard" was produced at the Gaiety Theatre. In those days a certain type of young man, since known by many names, including the present day "nut," was called a "masher"; and Burnand's burlesque included a duet with the refrain:

We are mashers, we are,
As we smoke our cigar
And crawl along, never too quick;
We are mashers, you bet,
With the light cigarette
And the quite irreproachable stick.

Nowadays the cigarette is in such universal use, that it would be impossible thus to associate it with any particular type of man, sane or inane.

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