Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

Although probably the conduct of the Codrington parishioners was unusual, it is certain that in the seventeenth century smoking at meetings held, not in the church itself, but in the vestry, was common. The churchwardens' accounts of St. Mary, Leicester, 1665-6, record the expenditure—"In beer and tobacco from first to last 7s. 10d." In those of St. Alphege, London Wall, for 1671, there are the entries—"For Pipes and Tobaccoe in the Vestry 2s.," and "For a grosse of pipes at severall times 2s." In the next century, however, the practice was modified. The St. Alphege accounts for 1739 have the entry—"Ordered that there be no Smoaking nor Drinking for the future in the Vestry Room during the time business is doing on pain of forfeiting one shilling, Assention Day excepted." From this it would seem fair to infer (1) that there was no objection to the lighting of pipes in the vestry after the business of the meeting had been transacted; and (2) that on Ascension Day for some inscrutable reason there was no prohibition at all of "Smoaking and Drinking."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

Sir Walter Scott said that in London a Scotchman would walk half a mile farther to purchase his ounce of snuff where the sign of the Highlander announced a North Briton.

Dickens's little figure, which adorned old Sol Gills's shop, "thrust itself out above the pavement, right leg foremost," with shoe buckles and flapped waistcoat very much unlike the real thing, and "bore at its right eye the most offensively disproportionate piece of machinery." But this was only one of many "little timber midshipmen in obsolete naval uniforms, eternally employed outside the shop-doors of nautical instrument-makers in taking observations of the hackney-coaches." All have disappeared, together with the black dolls of the rag shops and many other old-time figures. A stray highlander or two, or other figure, may survive here and there; but with very few exceptions indeed, the once abundant tobacconists' signs have disappeared from our streets as completely as the emblemsand tokens of other trades.

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