Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Barry's original plan for the Travellers' Club, erected in 1832, shows no smoking-room on the ground floor. It was probably some inconvenient apartment of no account. The early "Travellers" did smoke, for Theodore Hook, satirizing them and the club rule that no person was eligible as a member who had not travelled out of the British Islands to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line, wrote:

The travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the plains of Moselai,
The world for them has nothing new, they have explored all parts of it;
And now they are club-footed! and they sit and look at charts of it.

The present-day smoking-room at the Travellers' is a noble apartment, which was originally the coffee-room. It occupies the whole of the ground-floor front to the gardens of Carlton House Terrace, and is divided into three bays by the projection of square piers.

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The fine lady disliked tobacco. The author of "A Pipe of tobacco," in Dodsley's well-known "Collection," to which reference has already been made, wrote:

Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon;
They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.
* * * * * * *
Citronia vows it has an odious stink;
She will not smoke (ye gods!)-but she will drink;
and the same writer describes tobacco as "By ladies hated, hated by the beaux." Although the fine lady may have affected to swoon at the sight of pipes, and belles generally, like the beaux, may have disdained tobacco as vulgar, yet there were doubtless still to be found here and there respectable women who occasionally indulged in a smoke. In an early Spectator, Addison gives the rules of a "Twopenny Club, erected in this Place, for the Preservation of Friendship and good Neighbourhood," which met in a little ale-house and was frequented by artisans and mechanics. Rule II was, "Every member shall fill his pipe out of his own box"; and Rule VII was, "If any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or smokes."

In one of the valuable volumes issued by the Georgian Society of Dublin a year or two ago, Dr. Mahaffy, writing on the mid-eighteenth century society of the Irish capital, quotes an advertisement by a Dublin tobacconist of "mild pigtail for ladies" which suggests the alarming question-Did Irish ladies chew?

Read More