Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Perhaps the most absurd and unmeaning of the restrictions that remain, is that which at certain times and in certain places admits the smoking of cigars and cigarettes and forbids the smoking of pipes. The idea appears to be that a pipe is vulgar. There are few restaurants now in which smoking is not allowed after dinner; but the understanding is that cigars and cigarettes only shall be smoked. In some places of resort there are notices exhibited which specifically prohibit the smoking of pipes. Why? At a smoking concert where few pipes are smoked, anyone looking

Athwart the smoke of burning weeds
can at once realize how much greater is the volume of smoke from cigars and cigarettes than would result from the smoking of a like number of pipes. It cannot, therefore, be that pipes are barred because of a supposed greater effect upon the atmosphere of the room. The only conclusion the observer can come to is, that the fashionable attitude towards pipes is one of the last relics of the old social attitude—the attitude of Georgian and Early Victorian days—towards smoking of any kind. The cigar and the cigarette were first introduced among the upper classes of society, and their use has spread downward. They have broken down many barriers, and in many places, and under many and divers conditions, the pipe has followed triumphantly in their wake; but the last ditch of the old prejudice has been found in the convention, which, in certain places and at certain times, admits the cigar and cigarette of fashionable origin, but bars the entry of the plebeian pipe—the pipe which for two centuries was practically the only mode of smoking used or known.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

In the same "Pocket-Book" one of the ideals of a wife by a bachelor is-"To approve of smoking all over the house"; while one of the ideals of a husband by a spinster is-"Not to smoke, or use a latch-key." Mr. Punch's prelections, of course, are not to be taken too seriously. They all necessarily have the exaggeration of caricature; but at the same time they are all significant, and for the social historian are invaluable.

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