Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 3: 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 pipes of the divine smoake." That tobacco was often the most profitable part of a druggist's stock is also clear from the last sentence in Bishop Earle's character of "A Tobacco-Seller," one of the shortest in that remarkable collection of "Characters" which the Bishop issued in 1628 under the title of "Micro-Cosmographie."
From Chapter 7: The week-end habit was strong among London tradesmen in those days. Another Connoisseur paper of 1754 refers to the citizens' country-boxes as dusty retreats, because they were always built in close contiguity to the highway so that the inhabitants could watch the traffic, in the absence of anything more sensible to do, where "the want of London smoke is supplied by the smoke of Virginia tobacco," and where "our chief citizens are accustomed to pass the end and the beginning of every week." In the following year there is a description of a visit to Vauxhall by a worthy citizen with his wife and two daughters. After supper the poor man sadly laments that he cannot have his pipe, because his wife, with social ambitions, deems that it is "ungenteel to smoke, where any ladies are in company." Again, in the Connoisseur's rival, the World, founded and conducted by Edward Moore, there is a letter, in the number dated February 19, 1756, from a citizen who says: "I have the honour to be a member of a certain club in this city, where it is a standing order, That the paper called the World be constantly brought upon the table, with clean glasses, pipes and tobacco, every Thursday after dinner."
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