Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Some of the apothecaries whose shops were in most repute for the quality of the tobacco kept, took pupils and taught them the "slights," as tricks with the pipe were called. These included exhaling the smoke in little globes, rings and so forth. The invaluable Ben Jonson, in the preliminary account of the characters in his "Every Man out of his Humour," 1600, describes one Sogliardo as "an essential clown ... yet so enamoured of the name of a gentleman that he will have it though he buys it. He comes up every term to learn to take tobacco and see new motions." Sogliardo was accustomed to hire a private room to practise in. The fashionable way was to expel the smoke through the nose. In a play by Field of 1618, a foolish nobleman is asked by some boon companions in a tavern: "Will your lordship take any tobacco?" when another sneers, "'Sheart! he cannot put it through his nose!" His lordship was apparently not well versed in the "slights."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The Darlington and Stockton Times in 1856 recorded the death on December 10, at Wallbury, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the 110th year of her age, of Jane Garbutt, widow. Mrs. Garbutt had been twice married, her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic wars. The old woman, said the journal, "had dwindled into a small compass, but she was free from pain, retaining all her faculties to the last, and enjoying her pipe. About a year ago the writer of this notice paid her a visit, and took her, as a 'brother-piper,' a present of tobacco, which ingredient of bliss was always acceptable from her visitors. Asking of her the question how long she had smoked, her reply was 'Vary nigh a hundred years'!" In 1845 there died at Buxton, at the age of ninety-six, a woman named Pheasy Molly, who had been for many years an inveterate smoker. Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire. She had burned herself more than once before in performing the same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her end.

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