The Social History of Smoking Part 8

The earliest mention of cigars in English occurs in a book dated 1735.

A traveller in Spanish America, named c.o.c.kburn, whose narrative was published in that year, describes how he met three friars at Nicaragua, who, he says, "gave us some Seegars to smoke ... these are Leaves of Tobacco rolled up in such Manner that they serve both for a Pipe and Tobacco itself ... they know no other way here, for there is no such Thing as a Tobacco-Pipe throughout New Spain."

Cheroots seem to have been known somewhat earlier. The earliest mention of them is dated about 1670. Sir James Murray, in the great Oxford Dictionary, gives the following interesting extract from an unpublished MS. relating to India, written between 1669 and 1679: "The Poore Sort of Inhabitants vizt. yet Gentues, Mallabars, &c., Smoke theire Tobacco after a very meane, but I judge Original manner, Onely ye leafe rowled up, and light one end, holdinge ye other between their lips ... this is called a bunko, and by ye Portugals a Cheroota." The condemnation of cheroot-or cigar-smoking as a mean method of taking tobacco has an odd look in the light of modern habits and customs.

The use of cigars in this country began to come in early in the last century; and by at least 1830 they were being freely, if privately, smoked. It is probable that the reduction of the duty on cigars from 18s. to 9s. a lb., in 1829, had its effect in making cigars more popular. Croker, in 1831, commenting on Johnson's saying that smoking had gone out, said: "The taste for smoking, however, has revived, probably from the military habits of Europe during the French wars; but instead of the sober sedentary pipe, the ambulatory cigar is chiefly used." Croker's shrewd suggestion was probably not far wide of the truth. It is quite likely, if not highly probable, that the revival of smoking in the shape of the cigar was directly connected with the experiences of British officers in Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular War.

One of the earliest cigar-smokers must have been that remarkable clergyman, the Rev. Charles Caleb Colton, whose "Lacon," published in 1820, was once popular. Colton was in succession Rector of Tiverton and Vicar of Kew, but on leaving Kew became a wine-merchant in Soho.

While at Kew he is said to have kept cigars under the pulpit, where, he said, the temperature was exactly right.

At first even cigar-smoking was confined to comparatively few persons, and the social prejudice against tobacco continued unabated. Thackeray significantly makes Rawdon Crawley a smoker--the action of "Vanity Fair" takes place in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

The original smoking-room of the Athenaeum Club, which was founded in 1824, the present building being erected in 1830, was a miserable little room, Dr. Hawtree, on behalf of the committee, announcing that "no gentleman smoked." The Oriental Club, when built in 1826-27, contained no smoking-room at all.

Sir Walter Scott often smoked cigars, though he seems to have regarded it in the light of an indulgence to be half-apologized for. In his "Journal," July 4, 1829, he noted--"When I had finished my bit of dinner, and was in a quiet way smoking my cigar over a gla.s.s of negus, Adam Ferguson comes with a summons to attend him to the Justice Clerk's, where, it seems, I was engaged. I was totally out of case to attend his summons, redolent as I was of tobacco. But I am vexed at the circ.u.mstance. It looks careless, and, what is worse, affected; and the Justice is an old friend moreover." Tobacco in any form was suspect. A man might smoke a cigar, but he must not take the odour into the drawing-room of even an old friend.

A few years earlier, in November 1825, Scott had written in his "Journal" that after dinner he usually smoked a couple of cigars which operated as a sedative--

_Just to drive the cold winter away, And drown the fatigues of the day._

"I smoked a good deal," he continued, "about twenty years ago when at Ashestiel; but, coming down one morning to the parlour, I found, as the room was small and confined, that the smell was unpleasant, and laid aside the use of the _Nicotian weed_ for many years; but was again led to use it by the example of my son, a hussar officer, and my son-in-law, an Oxford student. I could lay it aside to-morrow; I laugh at the dominion of custom in this and many things.

"_We make the giants first, and then_ do not _kill them._"

Scott's remark that Lockhart smoked when an Oxford student rather discredits Archdeacon's Denison's statement, quoted in the preceding chapter, that smoking was very generally unknown in Oxford in 1823-24.

The archdeacon was writing from memory--a very untrustworthy recorder; Scott's remark was that of a contemporary.

Byron is reputed to have been another cigar-smoker. His apostrophe to tobacco in "The Island" (1823), a poem founded in part on the history of the Mutiny of the Bounty, is familiar. The lines are, indeed, almost the only familiar pa.s.sage in that poem:

_Sublime tobocco! which, from east to west, Cheers the tar's labours or the Turkman's rest; Which on the Moslem's ottoman divides His hours, and rivals opium and his brides; Magnificent in Stamboul, but less grand, Though not less loved, in Wapping or the Strand: Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe, When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe; Like other charmers, wooing the caress, More dazzlingly when daring in full dress; Yet thy true lovers more admire by far Thy naked beauties--Give me a cigar!_

How far these lines really represent the poet's own sentiments, and whether he habitually smoked either cigar or pipe, is another matter.

Other men of letters of the time were zealous adherents of the pipe.

One of these was the poet Campbell. From 1820 to 1830 he was editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_, and is reputed to have been so very unbusinesslike in his methods that there was always difficulty in getting proofs corrected and returned in good time. On one occasion, as reported by a member of the firm that printed the magazine, a proof had been lost, and the poet was informed that the article must go to press next day uncorrected. Campbell sent word that he would look in in the morning and correct it. Preparations were duly made to receive him; he was shown into the best room, and left with the proof on his table. After a while he rang the bell, and said, "I could do this much better if I had a pipe." Thereupon pipe and tobacco were procured and taken in to him. Campbell tore open the paper containing the tobacco, and, with a slightly contemptuous expression, exclaimed, "Ugh!

C'naster! I'd rather it had been s.h.a.g!"

Charles Lamb was a heavy pipe-smoker. He smoked too much--regretted it--but continued to smoke, not wisely but too well. "He came home very smoky and drinky last night," says his sister of him.

When sending some books to Coleridge at Keswick in November 1802, Lamb wrote--"If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right Gloucester, blacked in the candle (my usual supper), or peradventure, a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the crevices, look to that pa.s.sage more especially: depend upon it, it contains good matter." To Lamb, a book read best over a pipe.

The following year he wrote to Coleridge--"What do you think of smoking? I want your sober, _average, noon opinion_, of it. I generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it.

Morning is a girl, and can't smoke--she's no evidence one way or the other; and Night is so evidently _bought over_, he can't be a very upright judge. Maybe the truth is that _one_ pipe is wholesome, _two_ pipes toothsome, _three_ pipes noisome, _four_ pipes fulsome, _five_ pipes quarrelsome, and that's the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason.... After all, our instincts may be best." It is clear from one or two references, that Lamb and Coleridge had been accustomed to smoke together at their meetings in early days at the "Salutation and Cat"--with less disastrous results to Coleridge, it is to be hoped, than those which followed his Birmingham smoke, as set forth in the preceding chapter.

In 1805 Lamb wrote to Wordsworth--"now I have bid farewell to my 'sweet enemy' tobacco ... I shall, perhaps, set n.o.bly to work."

Forthwith he set to work on the farce "Mr. H.," which some months later was produced at Drury Lane and was promptly d.a.m.ned. After its failure Lamb wrote to Hazlitt--"We are determined not to be cast down.

I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces." But Lamb and his pipe were not to be parted by even repeated resolutions to leave off smoking. It was years after this that he met Macready at Talfourd's, and by way probably of saying something to shock Macready; whose personality could hardly have been sympathetic to him, uttered the remarkable wish that the last breath he drew in might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.

It was in 1818 that Lamb published the collection of his writings, in two volumes, which contained the well-known "Farewell to Tobacco,"

written in 1805, and referred to in the letter of that year to Wordsworth quoted above. Its phrases of mingled abuse and affection are familiar to lovers of Lamb.

Parr is reported to have once asked Lamb how he could smoke so much and so fast, and Lamb is said to have replied--"I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue." But if all accounts are true, Parr far outsmoked Lamb. If the essayist discontinued or modified his smoking habits, he made up for it by devotion to snuff--a devotion which his sister shared. A large snuff-box usually lay on the table between them, and they pushed it one to the other.

But it is time to return to the cigar, and the changing att.i.tude of fashion towards smoking.

There would appear to have been some smokers who disliked the new-fangled cigars. Angelo seems, from various pa.s.sages in his "Reminiscences," to have been a smoker, and to have been very frequently in the company of smokers, yet he could write: "There are few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that we are again in England, than the superiority of our stage-coaches.

There is something very exhilarating in being carried through the air with rapidity ... considering the rate at which stage-coaches now travel [_i.e._ in and just before 1830] ... a place on the box or front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat. But alas!

no human enjoyment is free from alloy. A Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner with his cigar in his mouth, has it in his power to turn the draft of sweet air into a cup of bitterness." Perhaps Angelo's objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by a "Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner," than to the cigar itself. Yet, going on to describe a journey to Hastings, sitting "on the roof in front" beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment of dashing along, anecdote and jest going merrily on, "we had the annoyance of a c.o.xcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air which Heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar,"

which looks as if his real objection was to _cigars_, as such.

The fashionable dislike of tobacco-smoke appears in the pages of another descriptive writer--the once well known N.P. Willis, the American author of many books of travel and gossip. In his "Pencillings by the Way," writing in July 1833, Willis describes the prevalence of smoking in Vienna among all the nationalities that thronged that cosmopolitan capital. "It is," he says, "like a fancy ball. Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians, Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and stinking costumes, promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest observation. Every third window is a pipe-shop, and they [presumably the pipes] show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of the pa.s.sion. Some of them are marked '200 dollars.' The streets reek with tobacco-smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within the Glacis. Your hotel, your cafe, your coach, your friend, are all redolent of the same disgusting odour." In the following year, describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon's in Scotland, Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed up and "conversation a.s.sumed a merrier cast," then "coffee and liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more slowly," and at eleven o'clock there was a general move to the drawing-room. The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain from Willis's silence on the subject--the "disgusting odour" would surely have disturbed him--that no single member of the large dinner-party dreamed of smoking, or, at all events, attempted to smoke.

By 1830 smoking had so far "come in" again that a considerable proportion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers.

Macaulay has drawn for us the not very attractive picture of the smoking-room of the old House of Commons--before the fire of 1834--in a letter to his sister dated in the summer of 1831. "I have left Sir Francis Burdett on his legs," he wrote, "and repaired to the smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen (tell it not to the West Indians), Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open, and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself."

In July 1832 he again dated a letter to his sisters from the House of Commons smoking-room. "I am writing here," he says, "at eleven at night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres ... with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils.... Reject not my letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room--

_The room,--but I think I'll describe it in rhyme, That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime.

The smell of tobacco was always the same: But the chloride was bought since the cholera came."_

The mention of pigtail shows that the House contained pipe- as well as cigar-smokers. A few days later he wrote again to his sisters, but this time from the library, where, he says, "we are in a far better atmosphere than in the smoking-room, whence I wrote to you last week."

One wonders why Macaulay, who apparently did not smoke himself, and who, though somewhat more tolerant of tobacco than his father, Zachary Macaulay, evidently did not like the atmosphere of the smoking-room, chose to write there, when the library--where he must surely have felt more at home--was available.

Among other well-known men of standing and fashion who were smokers about this period may be named Lord Eldon, Lord Stowell, Brougham, Lord Calthorp and H.R.H. the Duke of Suss.e.x. In Thackeray's "Book of Sn.o.bs," Miss Wirt, the governess at Major Ponto's, refers in shocked tones to "H.R.H. the poor dear Duke of Suss.e.x (such a man my dears, but alas! addicted to smoking!)."

Sad to say, the Royal Duke was not content with the cigar that was becoming fashionable, but actually smoked a pipe. Mrs. Stirling, in "The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope," 1913, notes that Lord Althorp was a frequent visitor about 1822 at Holkham, the well-known seat of Mr. c.o.ke of Norfolk, later Lord Leicester, and that on such occasions he enjoyed "the distinction of being the only guest besides the Duke of Suss.e.x who ever indulged in the rare habit of smoking. But while the Royal Duke was wont to puff away at a long meerschaum in his bedroom till he actually blinded himself, and all who came near him, Fidele Jack [Lord Althorp's nickname] behaved in more considerate fashion, only smoking out of doors as he pa.s.sed restlessly up and down the gra.s.s terrace."

With the revival of smoking, things changed at Holkham. On Christmas Day, 1847, Lady Elizabeth, writing to her husband from Holkham, the home of her childhood, remarked: "The Billiard table is always lighted up for the gentlemen when they come from shooting, and there they sit smoking."

The growing popularity of the cigar made smoking less unfashionable than it had been among the upper cla.s.ses of society; but among humbler folk pipe-smoking had never "gone out." Every public-house did its regular trade in clays, known as churchwardens and Broseleys, and by other names either of familiarity or descriptive of the place of manufacture; and on the mantelpiece or table of inn or ale-house stood the tobacco-box. Miss Jekyll, in her delightful book on "Old West Surrey," figures an example of these old public-house tobacco-boxes which is made of lead. It has bosses of lions' heads at the ends, and a portrait in relief on the front of the Duke of Wellington in his plumed c.o.c.ked hat. Inside, there is a flat piece of sheet-lead with a k.n.o.b to keep the tobacco pressed close, so that it may not dry up.

A curious and popular variety of tobacco-box often to be found in rural inns and ale-houses was made somewhat on the principle of the now everywhere familiar automatic machines. The late Mr. Frederick Gale, in a column of "Tobacco Reminiscences," which he contributed to the _Globe_ newspaper in 1899, said, that at village outdoor festivals of the 'thirties and early 'forties, respectable elderly farmers and tradesmen would sit "round a table, on which was an automatic, square, bra.s.s tobacco-box of large dimensions, into which the smokers dropped a halfpenny and the lid flew back, and the publican trusted to the smoker's honour to fill his pipe and close the box." When the pipes were filled they were lighted by means of tinder-box and flint, and a stable lanthorn supplied by the ostler. A penny would appear to have been a more usual charge, for a frequent inscription on the lid was:

_The custom is, before you fill, To put a penny in the till; When you have filled, without delay Close the lid, or sixpence pay._

One of these old bra.s.s penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes was included in the exhibition of Welsh Antiquities held at Cardiff in the summer of 1913.

In the Colchester Museum is an automatic tobacco-box and till of j.a.panned iron. On the lid of the box is painted a keg of tobacco and two clay pipes; and on that of the till the following doggerel lines:

_A halfpeny dropt into the till, Upsprings the lid and you may fill; When you have filled, without delay, Shut down the lid, or sixpence pay._

A correspondent of _Notes and Queries_, in 1908, mentioned that he possessed two of these old penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes, and had come across another in a dealer's shop of a somewhat peculiar make, about which he wished to get information. "It is of the ordinary shape," he wrote, "but differs from any I have previously seen in this respect, that it works with a sixpence, and not with a penny or halfpenny. It is engraved with the usual lines, except that the user is asked to put sixpence in the till, and then to shut down the lid under penalty of a fine of a shilling. What could it have been used for that was worth sixpence a time? Other uncommon features are that the money portion is shallow, and that the part for the tobacco extends the whole length of the box. I should say that the box is much smaller than any others I have ever seen." No information as to the use of this curious box was forthcoming from any of the learned and ingenious correspondents of _Notes and Queries_; and a problem which they cannot solve may not unreasonably be regarded as insoluble.

Readers of d.i.c.kens are familiar with the drawing by Cruikshank which ill.u.s.trates the chapter on "Scotland Yard" in d.i.c.kens's "Sketches by Boz," which was written before 1836. It shows the coal-heavers sitting round the fire shouting out "some st.u.r.dy chorus," and smoking long clays. "Here," wrote d.i.c.kens, "in a dark wainscoted-room of ancient appearance, cheered by the glow of a mighty fire ... sat the l.u.s.ty coal-heavers, quaffing large draughts of Barclay's best, and puffing forth volumes of smoke, which wreathed heavily above their heads, and involved the room in a thick dark cloud." These good folk and others of their kin had never been affected by any change of fashion in respect of smoking. In another of the "Sketches," the amusing "Tuggs's at Ramsgate," when poor Cymon Tuggs is hid behind the curtain, half dead with fear, he hears Captain Waters call for brandy and cigars--"The cigars were introduced; the captain was a professed smoker; so was the lieutenant; so was Joseph Tuggs." Poor Cymon, on the other hand, was one of those who could never smoke "without feeling it indispensably necessary to retire, immediately, and never could smell smoke without a strong disposition to cough."

Consequently, as the apartment was small, the door closed and the smoke powerful, poor Cymon was soon compelled to cough, which precipitated the catastrophe. It is noticeable that d.i.c.kens speaks of the three worthies as _professed_ smokers, a remark which suggests that such dare-devils, men who would take cigars as a matter of course and for enjoyment, and not merely out of a complimentary acquiescence in some one else's wish, were comparatively rare.

Other ill.u.s.trations of folk who smoked, not cigars, but pipes, may be drawn from "Pickwick," which was published in 1836. At the very beginning, when Mr. Pickwick calls a cab at Saint Martin's-le-Grand, the first cab is "fetched from the public-house, where he had been smoking his first pipe." At Rochester, Mr. Pickwick makes notes on the four towns of Strood, Rochester, Chatham and Brompton, where the military were present in strength, and hence the observant gentleman noted--"The consumption of tobacco in these towns must be very great: and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking." On the evening of the election at Eatanswill, Tupman and Snodgra.s.s resort to the commercial room of the Peac.o.c.k Inn, where "the atmosphere was redolent of tobacco-smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue to the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains which shaded the windows." Here, among others, were the dirty-faced man with a clay pipe, the very red-faced man behind a cigar, and the man with a black eye, who slowly filled a large Dutch pipe with most capacious bowl. Tupman and Snodgra.s.s were of the company and smoked cigars. Sam Weller's father smoked his pipe philosophically. If Sam's "mother-in-law" "flies in a pa.s.sion, and breaks his pipe, he steps out and gets another. Then she screams wery loud, and falls into 'sterics; and he smokes wery comfortably 'till she comes to agin." What better example could there be of pipe-engendered philosophy? When Mr.

Pickwick and Sam look in at old Weller's house of call off Cheapside, they find the boxes full of stage coachmen, drinking and smoking, and among them is the old gentleman himself, "smoking with great vehemence." After having given his son valuable parental advice, "Mr.

Weller, senior, refilled his pipe from a tin box he carried in his pocket, and, lighting his fresh pipe from the ashes of the old one, commenced smoking at a great rate."

A little later when Mr. Pickwick hunts up Perker's clerk Lowten, and joins the jovial circle at the Magpie and Stump, he finds on his right hand "a gentleman in a checked shirt and Mosaic studs, with a cigar in his mouth," who expresses the hope that the newcomer does not "find this sort of thing disagreeable." "Not in the least," replied Mr.