Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Lady Ritchie, in "Tennyson and his Friends," says: "I can remember vaguely, on one occasion through a cloud of smoke, looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet Laureate. He was sitting with my Father in the twilight after some family meal in the old house in Kensington." Thackeray was a cigar-smoker, but Tennyson was a devotee of the pipe. It was on this occasion, as the poet himself reminded Thackeray's daughter, that while the novelist was speaking, Lady Ritchie's little sister "looked up suddenly from the book over which she had been absorbed, saying in her sweet childish voice, 'Papa, why do you not write books like 'Nicholas Nickleby'?'"

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

Fairholt, in his book on "Tobacco," which was published in 1859, mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central America, but makes no reference to their use in this country.

The late Lady Dorothy Nevill said that although cigarettes are a modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "when old Peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece of paper. They called this a papelito, and I fancy it was much the same thing as a cigarette." But if this were so, the habit must have died out long before the cigarette, as we now know it, came into vogue.

It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there may have been an occasional cigarette-smoker in England, like the Edward Abbott of Mr. Hyndman's reminiscences, yet it was not until a little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls of tobacco became at all common among Englishmen; and it is quite likely that the credit (or discredit, as the reader pleases) of bringing them into general, and especially into fashionable, use, has been rightly given to Laurence Oliphant.

Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870. In "Puck," which was published in that year, Ouida-who is hardly an unimpeachable authority on the ways and customs of fashionable folk, though she loved to paint fancy pictures of their sayings and doings-pictures the Row: "the most fashionable lounge you have, but it is a Republic for all that." There, she says, "could Bill Jacobs lean against a rail, with a clay-pipe in his mouth, and a terrier under his arm, close beside the Earl of Guilliadene, with his cigarette and his eye-glass, and his Poole-cut habiliments."

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