Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

General Monk, to whom Charles II owed so much, is said to have indulged in the unpleasant habit of chewing tobacco, and to have been imitated by others; but the practice can never have been common.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The old Irishwomen who were once a familiar feature of London street-life as sellers of apples and other small wares at street corners, were often hardened smokers; and so were, and doubtless still are, many of the gipsy women who tramp the country. An old Seven Dials ballad has the following choice stanza-

When first I saw Miss Bailey,
'Twas on a Saturday,
At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,
And smoking a yard of clay.

Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign female smoking in the nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned. Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be whispered that here and there a lady-who was usually considered dreadfully "fast" for her pains-was accustomed to venture upon a cigarette.

In "Puck," 1870, Ouida represented one of her beautiful young men, Vy Bruce, as "murmuring idlest nonsense to Lilian Lee, as he lighted one of his cigarettes for her use"-but Lilian Lee was a cocotte.

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