Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Mr. Furniss, in the paragraph quoted on a previous page, says: "No gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a 'weed' in the streets." The nearest approach to this seems to have been smoking on club steps. Thackeray, in the seventeenth chapter of the "Book of Snobs," speaks of dandies smoking their cigars upon the steps of "White's," most fashionable of clubs, and, in an earlier chapter, of young Ensign Famish lounging and smoking on the steps of the "Union Jack Club," with half a dozen other "young rakes of the fourth or fifth order." Two of Thackeray's own drawings in the "Book of Snobs"—in chapters three and nine—show men, one civil the other military, smoking cigars out of doors; but as these were no doubt arrant snobs, the drawings may be accepted as proof of Mr. Furniss's statement.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Pendennis, when he comes home the first time from Oxbridge, brings with him a large box of cigars of strange brand, which he smokes "not only about the stables and greenhouses, where they were good" for his mother's plants, and which were obviously places to which a man who wished to smoke should betake himself, but in his own study, which rather shocks his mother. Pen goes from bad to worse during his University days, and, sad to say, one Sunday in the last long vacation, the "wretched boy," instead of going to church, "was seen at the gate of the Clavering Arms smoking a cigar, in the face of the congregation as it issued from St. Mary's. There was an awful sensation in the village society. Portman prophesied Pen's ruin after that, and groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal." Later the smoke from Warrington's short pipe and Pen's cigars floats through many pages of the novel.

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