Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 2: Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about smoking at this period, from the social point of view, was its fashionableness. One of the marked characteristics of the gallant—the beau or dandy or "swell" of the time—was his devotion to tobacco. Earle says that a gallant was one that was born and shaped for his clothes—but clothes were only a part of his equipment. Bishop Hall, satirizing the young man of fashion in 1597, describes the delicacies with which he was accustomed to indulge his appetite, and adds that, having eaten, he "Quaffs a whole tunnel of tobacco smoke"; and old Robert Burton, in satirically enumerating the accomplishments of "a complete, a well-qualified gentleman," names to "take tobacco with a grace," with hawking, riding, hunting, card-playing, dicing and the like. The qualifications for a gallant were described by another writer in 1603 as "to make good faces, to take Tobacco well, to spit well, to laugh like a waiting gentlewoman, to lie well, to blush for nothing, to looke big upon little fellowes, to scoffe with a grace ... and, for a neede, to ride prettie and well."
From Chapter 5: These seventeenth-century pipes were largely made in Holland of pipe-clay imported from England—to the disgust and loss of English pipe-makers. In 1663 the Company of tobacco-Pipe Makers petitioned Parliament "to forbid the export of tobacco pipe clay, since by the manufacture of pipes in Holland their trade is much damaged." Further, they asked for "the confirmation of their charter of government so as to empower them to regulate abuses, as many persons engage in the trade without licence." The Company's request was granted; but in the next year they again found it necessary to come to Parliament, showing "the great improvement in their trade since their incorporation, 17 James I, and their threatened ruin because cooks, bakers, and ale-house keepers and others make pipes, but so unskilfully that they are brought into disesteem; they request to be comprehended in the Statute of Labourers of 5 Elizabeth, so that none may follow the trade who have not been apprentices seven years."
|