Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

In remote English and Welsh parishes men seem occasionally to have smoked in churches without any intention of being irreverent, and without any consciousness that they were doing anything unusual. Canon Atkinson, in his delightful book "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish," tells how, when he first went to Danby in Cleveland—then very remote from the great world—and had to take his first funeral, he found inside the church the parish clerk, who was also parish schoolmaster by the way, sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window with his hat on and comfortably smoking his pipe. A correspondent of the Times in 1895 mentioned that his mother had told him how she remembered seeing smoking in a Welsh church about 1850—"The Communion table stood in the aisle, and the farmers were in the habit of putting their hats upon it, and when the sermon began they lit their pipes and smoked, but without any idea of irreverence." In an Essex church about 1861, a visitor had pointed out to him various nooks in the gallery where short pipes were stowed away, which he was informed the old men smoked during service; and several of the pews in the body of the church contained triangular wooden spittoons filled with sawdust.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

There would appear to have been some smokers who disliked the new-fangled cigars. Angelo seems, from various passages in his "Reminiscences," to have been a smoker, and to have been very frequently in the company of smokers, yet he could write: "There are few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that we are again in England, than the superiority of our stage-coaches. There is something very exhilarating in being carried through the air with rapidity ... considering the rate at which stage-coaches now travel [i.e. in and just before 1830] ... a place on the box or front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat. But alas! no human enjoyment is free from alloy. A Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner with his cigar in his mouth, has it in his power to turn the draft of sweet air into a cup of bitterness." Perhaps Angelo's objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by a "Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner," than to the cigar itself. Yet, going on to describe a journey to Hastings, sitting "on the roof in front" beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment of dashing along, anecdote and jest going merrily on, "we had the annoyance of a coxcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air which Heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar," which looks as if his real objection was to cigars, as such.

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