Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

This print is now chiefly of interest because the plate was adorned with a tiny etching by Hogarth, in which appear the figures of the British Lion and Britannia, both with pipes in their mouths, Britannia being seated on a cask of tobacco.

Hogarth was fond of introducing the pipe into his plates. In the tail-piece to his works, which he prepared a few months before his death, and which he called The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings, the end of everything is represented. Time himself, supported against a broken column, is expiring, his scythe falling from his grasp and a long clay pipe breaking in two as it falls from his lips. This was issued in 1764—Hogarth's last published work. In the plate which shows the execution of Thomas Idle, in the "Industry and Idleness" series, Hogarth depicts the little hangman smoking a short pipe as he sits on the top of the gallows, waiting for his victim. The familiar plate of A Modern Midnight Conversation shows a parson in surplice and wig smoking like a furnace while he ladles punch from a bowl—probably meant for a portrait of the notorious Orator Henley. Most of the other guests are also shown smoking long clay pipes.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The scene is a tavern interior. Around the table are four men and a woman, while a boy approaches carrying two huge measures of ale. One man is smoking furiously, while on the table lie three other pipes—one for each man—and sundry pots and glasses. The woman is plainly a convivial soul; but there is no pipe for her, and such provision was no doubt unusual.

T here is direct evidence, too, besides the story in the first paragraph of this chapter, that women disliked the prevalence of smoking. In Marston's "Antonio and Mellinda," 1602, Rosaline, when asked by her uncle when she will marry, makes the spirited reply—"Faith, kind uncle, when men abandon jealousy, forsake taking of tobacco, and cease to wear their beards so rudely long. Oh, to have a husband with a mouth continually smoking, with a bush of furs on the ridge of his chin, readie still to flop into his foaming chops, 'tis more than most intolerable;" and similar indications of dislike to smoking could be quoted from other plays.
On the other hand, it is certain that from comparatively early in the seventeenth century there were to be found here and there women who smoked.

On the title-page of Middleton's comedy, "The Roaring Girle," 1611, is a picture of the heroine, Moll Cutpurse, in man's apparel, smoking a pipe, from which a great cloud of smoke is issuing.

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