Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

At Oxford in early Georgian days a profound calm—so far as study was concerned—appears to have prevailed. Little work was done, but much tobacco was smoked. In 1733 a satire was published, violently attacking the Fellows of various colleges. According to this satirist the occupation of the Magdalen Fellow was to
drink, look big,
Smoke much, think little, curse the freeborn Whig—

from which it may not unreasonably be surmised that the author was a Tory; and however little enthusiasm there may have been at Oxford in those days for learning and study, there was plenty of life in political animosities.

Another witness to the dons' love of tobacco is Thomas Warton. In his "Progress of Discontent," written in 1746, he plaintively sang:

Return, ye days when endless pleasure
I found in reading or in leisure!
When calm around the Common Room
I puff'd my daily pipe's perfume!
Rode for a stomach, and inspected,
At annual bottlings, corks selected:
And dined untax'd, untroubled, under
The portrait of our pious Founder!

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

Fairholt, in his book on "Tobacco," which was published in 1859, mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central America, but makes no reference to their use in this country.

The late Lady Dorothy Nevill said that although cigarettes are a modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "when old Peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece of paper. They called this a papelito, and I fancy it was much the same thing as a cigarette." But if this were so, the habit must have died out long before the cigarette, as we now know it, came into vogue.

It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there may have been an occasional cigarette-smoker in England, like the Edward Abbott of Mr. Hyndman's reminiscences, yet it was not until a little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls of tobacco became at all common among Englishmen; and it is quite likely that the credit (or discredit, as the reader pleases) of bringing them into general, and especially into fashionable, use, has been rightly given to Laurence Oliphant.

Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870. In "Puck," which was published in that year, Ouida-who is hardly an unimpeachable authority on the ways and customs of fashionable folk, though she loved to paint fancy pictures of their sayings and doings-pictures the Row: "the most fashionable lounge you have, but it is a Republic for all that." There, she says, "could Bill Jacobs lean against a rail, with a clay-pipe in his mouth, and a terrier under his arm, close beside the Earl of Guilliadene, with his cigarette and his eye-glass, and his Poole-cut habiliments."

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