Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of three hundred years is complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking has never been so generally practised nor so smiled upon by fashion as it is at the present time. Men in their attitude towards tobacco have always been divisible into three classes—those who respected and followed and obeyed the conventions of society and the dictates of fashion, and smoked or did not smoke in accordance therewith; those who knew those conventions but disregarded them and smoked as and what they pleased; and those who neither knew nor cared whether such conventions existed, or what fashion might say, but smoked as and what, and when and where they pleased. At the present time the three classes tend to combine into one. There are, it is true, a few conventions and restrictions left; but they are not very strong, and will probably disappear one of these days. There is also, of course, and always has been, a fourth class of men, who for one reason or another, quite apart from what fashion may say or do, do not smoke at all.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

From the evidence so far adduced it may fairly be concluded, I think, that during the seventeenth century smoking was not fashionable, or indeed anything but rare, among the women of the more well-to-do classes, while among women of humbler rank it was an occasional, and in a few districts a fairly general habit.

The same conclusion holds good for the eighteenth century. Among women of the lowest class smoking was probably common enough. In Fielding's "Amelia," a woman of the lowest character is spoken of as "smoking tobacco, drinking punch, talking obscenely and swearing and cursing"—which accomplishments are all carefully noted, because none of them would be applicable to the ordinary respectable female.



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