The Social History of Smoking Part 5

The local authorities in our eastern counties seem to have had some curious ideas of their own as to where tobacco should or should not be smoked. In a previous chapter we have seen that at Norwich, ale-house keepers were fined for permitting smoking in their houses. At Methwold, Suffolk, the folk improved upon this. The court-books of the manor of Methwold contain the following entry made at a court held on October 4, 1695: "We agree that any person that is taken smoakeinge tobacco in the street shall forfitt one shillinge for every time so taken, and itt shall be lawfull for the petty constabbles to distrane for the same for to be putt to the uses abovesaid [_i.e._ "to the use of the town"]. Wee present Nicholas Baker for smoakeinge in the street, and doe amerce him 1s." The same rule is repeated at courts held in the years 1696 and 1699, but no other fine is mentioned at any subsequent courts. The good folk at Methwold may have been adepts at petty tyranny, but such an absurd regulation must soon have become a dead letter. While we are in the eastern counties we may note that in 1694 there died at Ely an apothecary named Henry Crofts, who owned, among some other unusual items in his inventory, casks of brandy and tobacco, which shows that even at that date, when regular tobacconists' shops for the sale of tobacco had long been common, the old business connexion between apothecaries and tobacco still occasionally existed.

The clay pipes called "aldermen," with longer stems than their predecessors, tipped with glaze, came into use towards the end of the seventeenth century. They must not be confused with the much longer "churchwarden" or "yard of clay" which was not in vogue till the early years of the nineteenth century.

Towards the close of the seventeenth century signs may be detected of some waning in the universal popularity of tobacco. There are hints of change in the records of City and other companies. Tobacco had always figured prominently in the provision for trade feasts. In 1651 the Chester Company of Barbers, Surgeons, Wax and Tallow Chandlers--a remarkably comprehensive organization--paid for "Sack beere and Tobacco" at the Talbot on St. Luke's Day, October 18, on the occasion of a dinner given to the Company by one Richard Walker; and similar expenditure was common among both London and provincial Companies.

The court-books of the Skinners Company of London show that in preparation for their annual Election Dinner in 1694, the cook appeared before the court and produced a bill of fare which, with some alterations, was agreed to. The butler then appeared and undertook to provide knives, salt, pepper-pots, gla.s.ses, sauces, &c., "and everything needfull for 7. and if he gives content then to have 8.

he provides all things but pipes, Tobacco, candles and beer"--which apparently fell to the lot of some other caterer.

But so early as 1655 there is a sign of change of custom--a change, that is, in the direction of restricting and limiting the hitherto unbounded freedom granted to the use of tobacco. The London Society of Apothecaries on August 15, 1655, held a meeting for the election of a Master and an Upper Warden; and from the minutes of this meeting we learn that by general consent it was forbidden henceforward to smoke in the Court Room while dining or sitting, under penalty of half a crown.

The more fashionable folk of the Restoration Era and later began to leave off if not to disdain the smoking-habit. Up to about 1700 smoking had been permitted in the public rooms at Bath, but when Nash then took charge, tobacco was banished. Public or at least fashionable taste had begun to change, and Nash correctly interpreted and led it.

Sorbiere, who has been quoted in the previous chapter, remarked in 1663 that "People of Quality" did not use tobacco so much as others; and towards the end of the century and in Queen Anne's time the tendency was for tobacco to go out of fashion. This did not much affect its general use; but the tendency--with exceptions, no doubt--was to restrict the use of tobacco to the clergy, to country squires, to merchants and tradesmen and to the humbler ranks of society--to limit it, in short, to the middle and lower cla.s.ses of the social commonwealth as then organized. In the extraordinary record of inanity which Addison printed as the diary of a citizen in the _Spectator_ of March 4, 1712, the devotion of the worthy retired tradesman to tobacco is emphasized. This is the kind of thing: "Monday ... Hours 10, 11 and 12 Smoaked three Pipes of Virginia ... one o'clock in the afternoon, chid Ralph for mislaying my Tobacco-Box....

Wednesday ... From One to Two Smoaked a Pipe and a half.... Friday ...

From Four to Six. Went to the Coffee-house. Met Mr. Nisby there.

Smoaked several Pipes."

There was indeed no diminution of tobacco-smoke in the coffee-houses.

A visitor from abroad, Mr. Muralt, a Swiss gentleman, writing about 1696, said that character could be well studied at the coffee-houses.

He was probably not a smoker himself, for he goes on to say that in other respects the coffee-houses are "loathsome, full of smoke like a guardroom, and as much crowded." He further observed that it was common to see the clergy of London in coffee-houses and even in taverns, with pipes in their mouths. A native witness of about the same date, Ned Ward, writes sneeringly in his "London Spy," 1699, of the interior of the coffee-house. He saw "some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jingling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot, or a boatswain's cabin.... We each of us stuck in our mouths a pipe of sotweed, and now began to look about us." Ward's contemporary, Tom Brown, took a different tone: he wrote of "Tobacco, Cole and the Protestant Religion, the three great blessings of life!"--as strange a jumble as one could wish for.

Even children seem to have smoked sometimes in the coffee-houses.

Ralph Th.o.r.esby, the Leeds antiquary, tells a strange story. He declares that, one evening which he spent with his brother at Garraway's Coffee-house, February 20, 1702, he was surprised to see his brother's "sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco and smoke it as _audfarandly_ as a man of three score; after that a second and a third pipe without the least concern, as it is said to have done above a year ago." A child of two years of age smoking three pipes in succession is a picture a little difficult to accept as true. As this is the only reference to tobacco in the whole of his "Diary," it is not likely that Th.o.r.esby was himself a smoker.

At the coffee-house entrance was the bar presided over by the predecessors of the modern barmaids--grumbled at in a _Spectator_ as "idols," who there received homage from their admirers, and who paid more attention to customers who flirted with them than to more sober-minded visitors. They are described by Tom Brown as "a charming Phillis or two, who invited you by their amorous glances into their smoaky territories." Admission cost little. There you might see--

_Grave wits, who, spending farthings four, Sit, smoke, and warm themselves an hour._

The allusions in the _Spectator_ to smoking in the coffee-houses are frequent. "Sometimes," says Addison, in his t.i.tle character in the first number of the paper, "sometimes I smoak a pipe at Child's and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the _Post-man_, over-hear the conversation of every table in the room." And here is a vignette of coffee-house life in 1714 from No. 568 of the _Spectator_: "I was yesterday in a coffee-house not far from the Royal Exchange, where I observed three persons in close conference over a pipe of tobacco; upon which, having filled one for my own use, I lighted it at the little wax candle that stood before them; and after having thrown in two or three whiffs amongst them, sat down and made one of the company. I need not tell my reader, that lighting a man's pipe at the same candle is looked upon among brother-smoakers as an overture to conversation and friendship." From the very beginning smoking has induced and fostered a spirit of comradeship.

Sir Roger de Coverley, as a typical country squire, was naturally a smoker. He presented his friend the Spectator, the silent gentleman, with a tobacco-stopper made by Will Wimble, telling him that Will had been busy all the early part of the winter in turning great quant.i.ties of them, and had made a present of one to every gentleman in the county who had good principles and smoked. When Sir Roger was driving in a hackney-coach he called upon the coachman to stop, and when the man came to the window asked him if he smoked. While Sir Roger's companion was wondering "what this would end in," the knight bid his Jehu to "stop by the way at any good Tobacconist's, and take in a Roll of their best Virginia." And when he visited Squire's near Gray's Inn Gate, his first act was to call for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a dish of coffee, a newspaper and a wax candle; and all the boys in the coffee-room ran to serve him. The wax candle was of course a convenience in matchless days for pipe-lighting. The "paper of tobacco" was the equivalent of what is now vulgarly called a "screw"

of tobacco.

The practice of selling tobacco in small paper packets was common, and moralists naturally had something to say about the fate of an author's work, when the leaves of his books found their ultimate use as wrappers for the weed. "For as no mortal author," says Addison, "in the ordinary fate and vicissitude of things, knows to what use his works may, some time or other, be applied, a man may often meet with very celebrated names in a paper of tobacco. I have lighted my pipe more than once with the writings of a prelate."

Addison and Steele smoked, and so did Prior, who seems to have had a weakness at times for low company. After spending an evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope and Swift, it is recorded that he would go "and smoke a pipe, and drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier and his wife, in Long Acre, before he went to bed." Some of Prior's poems, as Thackeray caustically remarks, smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Pope for awhile attended the symposium at b.u.t.ton's coffee-house, where Addison was the centre of the coterie--he describes himself as sitting with them till two in the morning over punch and Burgundy amid the fumes of tobacco--but such a way of life did not suit his sickly const.i.tution, and he soon withdrew. It is not likely that he smoked.

The attractions and the atmosphere of provincial coffee-houses were much the same as those of the London resorts. A German gentleman who visited Cambridge in July and August 1710 remarked that in the Greeks'

coffee-house in that town, in the morning and after 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you could meet the chief professors and doctors, who read the papers over a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco. One of the learned doctors took the German visitor to the weekly meeting of a Music Club in one of the colleges. Here were a.s.sembled bachelors, masters and doctors of music of the University--no professionals were employed--who performed vocal and instrumental music to their mutual gratification, though, apparently, not to the satisfaction of the visitor, who records his opinion that the music was "very poor." "It lasted," he says, "till 11 P.M., there was besides smoking and drinking of wine, though we did not do much of either. At 11 the reckoning was called for, and each person paid 2s."

There was clearly no prejudice against smoking at Cambridge. Abraham de la Pryme notes in his diary for the year 1694 that when it was rumoured in May of that year that a certain house opposite one of the colleges was haunted, strange noises being heard in it, several scholars of the college said, "Come, fetch us a good pitcher of ale, and tobacco and pipes, and wee'l sit up and see this spirit." The ale was duly provided, the pipes were lit, and the courageous smokers spent the night in the house, sitting "singing and drinking there till morning," but, alas! they neither saw nor heard anything.

Smoking was still popular also at Oxford. A. D'Anvers, in her "Academia; or the Humours of Oxford," 1691, speaks, indeed, of undergraduates who, when they could not get tobacco, did much as the parson of Thornton is reputed to have done, as already related in Chapter II, _i.e._ they condescended to smoke fragments of mats. With this may be compared the macaronic lines:

_At si_ Mundungus _desit: tum non_ funcare _recusant_ Brown-Paper _tosta, vel quod fit arundine_ bed-mat.

Tobacco, in Queen Anne's time, still maintained its hold over large cla.s.ses of the people, and was still dominant in most places of public resort; but there were signs of change in various directions as we have seen, and smoking had to a large extent ceased to be fashionable.

Pepys has very few allusions to tobacco; Evelyn fewer still. There is little evidence as to whether or not the gallants of the Restoration Court smoked; but considering the foppery of their attire and manners, it seems almost certain that tobacco was not in favour among them. The beaux with their full wigs--they carried combs of ivory or tortoisesh.e.l.l in their pockets with which they publicly combed their flowing locks--their dandy canes and scented, laced handkerchiefs, were not the men to enjoy the flavour of tobacco in a pipe. They were still tobacco-worshippers; but they did not smoke. The Indian weed retained its empire over the men (and women) of fashion by changing its form. The beaux were the devotees of snuff. The deftly handled pinch pleasantly t.i.tillated their nerves, and the dexterous use of the snuff-box, moreover, could also serve the purposes of vanity by displaying the beautiful whiteness of the hand, and the splendour of the rings upon the fingers. The curled darlings of the late seventeenth century and the "pretty fellows" of Queen Anne's time did not forswear tobacco, but they abjured smoking. Snuff-taking was universal in the fashionable world among both men and women; and the development of this habit made smoking unfashionable.

VII

SMOKING UNFASHIONABLE: EARLY GEORGIAN DAYS

Lord Fopling smokes not--for his teeth afraid; Sir Tawdry smokes not--for he wears brocade.

ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE, _circa_ 1740.

With the reign of Queen Anne tobacco had entered on a period, destined to be of long duration, when smoking was to a very large extent under a social ban. Pipe-smoking was unfashionable--that is to say, was not practised by men of fashion, and was for the most part regarded as "low" or provincial--from the time named until well into the reign of Queen Victoria. The social taboo was by no means universal--some of the exceptions will be noted in these pages--but speaking broadly, the general, almost universal smoking of tobacco which had been characteristic of the earlier decades of the seventeenth century did not again prevail until within living memory.

Throughout the eighteenth century the use of tobacco for smoking was largely confined to the middle and humbler cla.s.ses of society. To smoke was characteristic of the "cit," of the country squire, of the clergy (especially of the country parsons), and of those of lower social status. But at the same time it must be borne in mind that then, as since, the dictates of fashion and the conventions of society were little regarded by many artists and men of letters.

In the preceding chapter I quoted from Addison's diary of a retired tradesman in the _Spectator_ of 1712. The periodical publications of a generation or so later paid the great essayist the flattery of imitation in this respect as in others. In the _Connoisseur_ of George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, for instance, there is, in 1754, the description of a citizen's Sunday. The good man, having sent his family to church in the morning, goes off himself to Mother Redcap's, a favourite tavern--suburban in those days--or house of call for City tradesmen. There he smokes half a pipe and drinks a pint of ale. In the evening at another tavern he smokes a pipe and drinks two pints of cider, winding up the inane day at his club, where he smokes three pipes before coming home at twelve to go to bed and sleep soundly.

The week-end habit was strong among London tradesmen in those days.

Another _Connoisseur_ paper of 1754 refers to the citizens'

country-boxes as dusty retreats, because they were always built in close contiguity to the highway so that the inhabitants could watch the traffic, in the absence of anything more sensible to do, where "the want of London smoke is supplied by the smoke of Virginia tobacco," and where "our chief citizens are accustomed to pa.s.s the end and the beginning of every week." In the following year there is a description of a visit to Vauxhall by a worthy citizen with his wife and two daughters. After supper the poor man sadly laments that he cannot have his pipe, because his wife, with social ambitions, deems that it is "ungenteel to smoke, where any ladies are in company."

Again, in the _Connoisseur's_ rival, the _World_, founded and conducted by Edward Moore, there is a letter, in the number dated February 19, 1756, from a citizen who says: "I have the honour to be a member of a certain club in this city, where it is a standing order, That the paper called the _World_ be constantly brought upon the table, with clean gla.s.ses, pipes and tobacco, every Thursday after dinner."

The country gentlemen of the time followed the hounds and enjoyed rural sports of all kinds, drank ale, and smoked tobacco. They had their smoking-rooms too. Walter Gale, schoolmaster at Mayfield, Suss.e.x, noted in his Journal under date March 26, 1751: "I went to Mr.

Baker's for the list of scholars, and found him alone in the smoaking-room; he ordered a pint of mild beer for me, an extraordinary thing." Gale himself was a regular smoker, and too fond of pints of ale.

Fielding has immortalized the squire of the mid-eighteenth century in his picture of that sporting, roaring, swearing, drinking, smoking, affectionate, irascible, blundering, altogether extraordinary owner of broad acres, Squire Western. We may shrewdly suspect that the portrait of Western is somewhat over-coloured, and cannot fairly be taken as typical; but there is sufficient evidence to show that in some respects at least--in his enthusiasm for sport and love of ale and tobacco--Western is representative of the country squires of his day.

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."

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!_

Warton and another Oxford smoker of some distinction--the Rev. William Crowe, who was Public Orator from 1784 to 1829--are both said to have been, like Prior, rather fond of frequenting the company of persons of humble rank and little education, with whom they would drink their ale and smoke their pipes.

Mr. A.D. G.o.dley, in his "Oxford in the Eighteenth Century," gives an excellent English version of the Latin original of one of the Christ Church "Carmina Quadragesmalia," which affords much the same picture of the daily life of an Oxford Fellow in the days when George I was king. This good man lives strictly by rule, and each returning day--

_Ne'er swerves a hairbreadth from the same old way.

Always within the memory of men He's risen at eight and gone to bed at ten: The same old cat his College room partakes, The same old scout his bed each morning makes: On mutton roast he daily dines in state (Whole flocks have perished to supply his plate), Takes just one turn to catch the westering sun, Then reads the paper, as he's always done; Soon cracks in Common-room the same old jokes, Drinking three gla.s.ses ere three pipes he smokes:-- And what he did while Charles our throne did fill 'Neath George's heir you'll find him doing still._

It seems to have been taken for granted that country parsons smoked.