Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

Nowadays, if smoking takes place in church at all, it can only be done with intentional irreverence; and it is painful to think that even at the present day there are people in whom a feeling of reverence and decency is so far lacking as to lead them to desecrate places of worship. The Vicar of Lancaster, at his Easter vestry meeting in 1913, complained of bank-holiday visitors to the parish church who ate their lunch, smoked, and wore their hats while looking round the building. It is absurd to suppose that these people were unconscious of the impropriety of their conduct.

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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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