Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

The most famous of country clergymen of the early Georgian period is, of course, Fielding's lovable and immortal Parson Adams. Throughout "Joseph Andrews" the parson smokes at every opportunity. At his first appearance on the scene, in the inn kitchen, he calls for a pipe of tobacco before taking his place at the fireside. The next morning, when he fails to obtain a desired loan from the landlord, Adams, extremely dejected at his disappointment, immediately applies to his pipe, "his constant friend and comfort in his affliction," and leans over the rails of the gallery overlooking the inn-yard, devoting himself to meditation, "assisted by the inspiring fumes of tobacco." Later on, in the parlour of the country Justice of the Peace, who condemned his prisoners before he had taken the depositions of the witnesses against them, and who, by the way, also lit his pipe while his clerk performed this necessary duty, Adams, when his character has been cleared, sits down with the company and takes a cheerful glass and applies himself vigorously to smoking. A few hours later, when the parson, Fanny, and their guide are driven by a storm of rain to take shelter in a wayside ale-house, Adams "immediately procured himself a good fire, a toast and ale, and a pipe, and began to smoke with great content, utterly forgetting everything that had happened." In the same inn, after Mrs. Slipslop has appeared and disappeared, Adams smokes three pipes and takes "a comfortable nap in a great chair," so leaving the lovers, Joseph and Fanny, to enjoy a delightful time together.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

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 Athenæum 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.

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