Transcriber's Note:
A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this text.
For a complete list, please see the bottom of this document.
Hover over greek words for a transliteration.
This is the first attempt to write the history of smoking in thiscountry from the social point of view. There have been many bookswritten about tobacco—F.W. Fairholt's "History of Tobacco," 1859, andthe "Tobacco" (1857) of Andrew Steinmetz, are still valuableauthorities—but hitherto no one has told the story of thefluctuations 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 tried to confinemyself strictly to the changes in the attitude of society towardssmoking, and to such historical and social sidelights as serve toilluminate that theme.
The tobacco-pipe was popular among every section of society in thiscountry in an amazingly short space of time after smoking was firstpractised for pleasure, and retained its ascendancy for noinconsiderable period. Signs of decline are to be observed during thelatter part of the seventeenth century; and in the course of itssuccessor smoking fell more and more under the ban of fashion. Earlyin the nineteenth century tobacco-smoking had reached its nadir fromthe social point of view. Then came the introduction of the cigar andthe revival of smoking in the circles from which it had long beenalmost [8]entirely absent. The practice was hedged about and obstructedby a host of restrictions and conventions, but as the nineteenthcentury advanced the triumphant progress of tobacco became more andmore marked. The introduction of the cigarette completed what thecigar had begun; barriers and prejudices crumbled and disappeared withincreasing rapidity; until at the present day tobacco-smoking inEngland—by pipe or cigar or cigarette—is more general, morecontinuous, and more free from conventional restrictions than at anyperiod since the early days of its triumph in the first decades of theseventeenth century.
The tracing and recording of this social history of the smoking-habit,touching as it does so m