This is the first attempt to write the history of smoking in this country from the social point of view. There have been many books written about tobacco—F.W. Fairholt's "History of Tobacco," 1859, and the "Tobacco" (1857) of Andrew Steinmetz, are still valuable authorities—but hitherto no one has told the story of the fluctuations of fashion in respect of the practice of smoking. Much that is fully and well treated in such a work as Fairholt's "History" is ignored in the following pages. I have

Dean Hole. There is little doubt that the smoke of herbs and leaves of various kinds was inhaled in this country, and in Europe generally, long before tobacco was ever heard of on this side the Atlantic. But whatever smoking of this kind took place was medicinal and not social. Many instances have been recorded of the finding of pipes resembling those used for tobacco-smoking in Elizabethan times, in positions and in circumstances which would seem to point to much greater antiquity of use than t

Wits' Recreations , 1640. This chapter and the next deal with the history of smoking during the first fifty years after its introduction as a social habit—roughly to 1630. The use of tobacco spread with extraordinary rapidity among all classes of society. During the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign and through the early decades of the seventeenth century tobacco-pipes were in full blast. Tobacco was triumphant. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about smoking at this period, from the social

Ben Jonson , The Alchemist . The druggists and other tradesmen who sold tobacco in Elizabethan and Jacobean days had every provision for the convenience of their numerous customers. Some so-called druggists, it may be shrewdly suspected, did much more business in tobacco than they did in drugs. Dekker tells us of an apothecary and his wife who had no customers resorting to their shop "for any phisicall stuffe," but whose shop had many frequenters in the shape of gentlemen who "came to take their

"A custom lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse."— James I , A Counterblaste to Tobacco . The social history of smoking from the point of view of fashion, during the period covered by this and the next two chapters may be summarized in a sentence. Through the middle of the seventeenth century smoking maintained its hold upon

George Wither (1588-1667). The year 1660 that restored Charles II to his throne, restored a gaiety and brightness, not to say frivolity of tone, that had long been absent from English life. The following song in praise of tobacco, taken from a collection which was printed in 1660, is touched with the spirit of the time; though it is really founded on, and to no small extent taken from, some verses in praise of tobacco written by Samuel Rowlands in his "Knave of Clubs," 1611: There is nothing to

Sir Samuel Garth (1660-1718). After King William III was settled on the throne the sum of £600,000 was paid to the Dutch from the English exchequer for money advanced in connexion with his Majesty's expedition, and this amount was paid off by tobacco duties. Granger long ago remarked that most of the eminent divines and bishops of the day contributed very practically to the payment of this revolutionary debt by their large consumption of tobacco. He mentions Isaac Barrow, Dr. Barlow of Lincoln,

Isaac Hawkins Browne , circa 1740. With the reign of Queen Anne tobacco had entered on a period, destined to be of long duration, when smoking was to a very large extent under a social ban. Pipe-smoking was unfashionable—that is to say, was not practised by men of fashion, and was for the most part regarded as "low" or provincial—from the time named until well into the reign of Queen Victoria. The social taboo was by no means universal—some of the exceptions will be noted in these pages—but spea

William Cowper . (From a letter to the Rev. John Newton, May 28, 1782.) "Smoking has gone out," said Johnson in talk at St. Andrews, one day in 1773. "To be sure," he continued, "it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes and noses, and having the same thing done to us; yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out." Johnson did not trouble himself to think of h

Thomas Hood. The revival of smoking among those who were most amenable to the dictates of fashion, and among whom consequently tobacco had long been in bad odour, came by way of the cigar. In the preceding chapters all the references to and illustrations of smoking have been concerned with pipes. Until the early years of the nineteenth century the use of cigars was practically unknown in this country. The earliest notices of cigars in English books occur in accounts of travel in Spain and Portug

Lamb , A Farewell to Tobacco . The social attitude towards smoking in early Victorian days, and for some time later, was curious. The development of cigar-smoking among those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished, and the natural consequent spread downwards of the use of cigars—in accordance with the invariable law of fashion—together with the continued devotion to the pipe among those whose love of tobacco had never slackened, made smoking a much more general practice th

Henry S. Leigh. The social history of smoking in later Victorian days is marked by the triumph of the cigarette. The introduction of the cigar, as we have seen, brought about the revival of smoking, from the point of view of fashion, in the early decades of the nineteenth century; and the coming of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun. The earliest references for the word "cigarette" in the Oxford Dictionary are dated 1842 and 1843, but both refer to the smoking of cigarettes abroad—

C.S. Calverley. 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

Isaac Hawkins Browne , circa 1740. A story is told of Sir Walter Raleigh by John Aubrey which seems to imply that at first women not only did not smoke, but that they disliked smoking by men. Aubrey says that Raleigh "standing in a stand at Sir R. Poyntz's parke at Acton, tooke a pipe of tobacco, which made the ladies quitt it till he had done." But this objection, whether general or not, soon vanished, for, as we have seen in a previous chapter, the gallant of Elizabethan and Jacobean days made

Charles Lamb , A Farewell to Tobacco . The use of tobacco in churches forms a curious if short chapter in the social history of smoking. The earliest reference to such a practice occurs in 1590, when Pope Innocent XII excommunicated all such persons as were found taking snuff or using tobacco in any form in the church of St. Peter, at Rome; and again in 1624, Pope Urban VIII issued a bull against the use of tobacco in churches. In England it would seem as if some of the early smokers, in the ful

"I would enjoin every shop to make use of a sign which bears some affinity to the wares in which it deals." Addison , Spectator , April 2, 1711. Shop-signs were one of the most conspicuous features of the streets of old London. In days when the numbering of houses was unknown, the use of signs was indispensable for identification; and greatly must they have contributed to the quaint and picturesque appearance of the streets. Some projected far over the narrow roadway—competition to attract atten