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: This brief "Character" is hardly so pointed or so effective as some of the others in the "Micro-Cosmographie," but it would seem that the Bishop was not very friendly to tobacco. In the character of "A Drunkard" he says: " Tobacco serves to aire him after a washing [ i.e. a drinking-bout], and is his onely breath, and breathing while." In another, a tavern "is the common consumption of the Afternoone, and the murderer, or maker away of a rainy day. It is the Torrid Zone that scorches the face, and Tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up."
From Chapter 8:
In the fashionable world the snuff-box was all-powerful. The Prince Regent was devoted to snuff, but disdained tobacco. He had a "cellar of snuff," which after his death was sold, said John Bull, August 15, 1830, "to a well-known purveyor, for £400." Lord Petersham, famous among dandies, made a wonderful collection of snuffs and snuff-boxes, and was curious in his choice of a box to carry. Gronow relates that once when a light Sèvres snuff-box which Lord Petersham was using, was admired, the noble owner replied, with a gentle lisp—"Yes, it is a nice summer box—but would certainly be inappropriate for winter wear!" The well-known purveyor who bought the Prince Regent's cellar of snuff, and who bought also Lord Petersham's stock, was the Fribourg of Fribourg and Treyer, whose well-known old-fashioned shop at the top of the Haymarket, with a bow-window on each side of the door, still gives an eighteenth-century flavour to that thoroughfare. All the dandies of the period were connoisseurs of snuff, and imitated the royal mirror of fashion in their devotion to the scented powder. Young Charles Stanhope wrote to his brother on November 5, 1812—"I have learnt to take snuff among other fashionable acquirements, a custom which, of course, you have learnt and will be able to keep me in countenance." But no dandies or young men of fashion smoked. Tobacco, save in the disguise of snuff, was tabooed.
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