Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

The prejudice against the pipe is not confined to places of indoor resort. There are many men who smoke pipes within doors, who yet would not care to be seen in London smoking a pipe in the street, or in the park. In some circumstances this is quite intelligible. The writer of the Morning Post article remarked with much force and good sense that "Apart from social environment, there is a certain affinity between pipes and clothes. It is considered 'bad form' for a man in a frock-coat and silk hat to be seen smoking a pipe in the streets. If you are wearing a bowler hat and a lounge suit you may walk along with a briar protruding from your lips, and no one will think ill of you. If you are a son of toil garbed in your habit as you work, there is nothing incongruous in a well-seasoned clay or a 'nose-warmer,' which, for convenience, you carry upside down. Not so very long ago it was considered unseemly to smoke a pipe at all in the street unless you belonged to the humbler orders, who inhale their nicotine through the stem of a clay and expectorate with a greater sense of freedom than of responsibility."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Other men of letters of the time were zealous adherents of the pipe. One of these was the poet Campbell. From 1820 to 1830 he was editor of the New Monthly Magazine, and is reputed to have been so very unbusinesslike in his methods that there was always difficulty in getting proofs corrected and returned in good time. On one occasion, as reported by a member of the firm that printed the magazine, a proof had been lost, and the poet was informed that the article must go to press next day uncorrected. Campbell sent word that he would look in in the morning and correct it. Preparations were duly made to receive him; he was shown into the best room, and left with the proof on his table. After a while he rang the bell, and said, "I could do this much better if I had a pipe." Thereupon pipe and tobacco were procured and taken in to him. Campbell tore open the paper containing the tobacco, and, with a slightly contemptuous expression, exclaimed, "Ugh! C'naster! I'd rather it had been shag!"

Charles Lamb was a heavy pipe-smoker. He smoked too much—regretted it—but continued to smoke, not wisely but too well. "He came home very smoky and drinky last night," says his sister of him.

When sending some books to Coleridge at Keswick in November 1802, Lamb wrote—"If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right Gloucester, blacked in the candle (my usual supper), or peradventure, a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the crevices, look to that passage more especially: depend upon it, it contains good matter." To Lamb, a book read best over a pipe.

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