Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 1:

Wherever Raleigh is known to have lived or lodged we are sure to find the tradition flourishing that there he smoked his first pipe. The assertion has been made of his birthplace, Hayes Barton, although it is very doubtful if he ever visited the place after his parents left it, some years before their son had become acquainted with tobacco; and also with more plausibility of his home at Youghal, in the south of Ireland. Froude, in one of his "Short Studies," quotes a legend to the effect that Raleigh smoked on a rock below the Manor House of Greenaway, on the River Dart, which was the home of the first husband of Katherine Champernowne, afterwards Raleigh's wife; and Devonshire guide-books have adopted the story.

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 4:

It is somewhat singular that the Puritans, who denounced most amusements and pleasures, and who frowned upon most of the occupations or diversions that make for gaiety and the enjoyment of life, did not, as Puritans, denounce the use of tobacco. One or two of their writers abused it roundly; but these were not representative of Puritan feeling on the subject. The explanation doubtless is that the practice of smoking was so very general and so much a matter of course among men of all ranks and of all opinions, that the mouths of Puritans were closed, so to speak, by their own pipes. A precisian, however, could take his tobacco with a difference. The seventeenth-century diarist, Abraham de la Pryme, says that he had heard of a Presbyterian minister who was so precise that "he would not as much as take a pipe of tobacco before that he had first sayed grace over it." George Wither, one of the most noteworthy of the poets who took the side of the Parliament, was confined in Newgate after the Restoration, and found comfort in his pipe.

Read More