Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

Country gentlemen smoked just as much as town mechanics and tradesmen. In 1688 Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, wrote to Mr. Thomas Cullum, of Hawsted Place, desiring "to be remembered by the witty smoakers of Hawsted." A later Cullum, Sir John, published in 1784 a "History and Antiquities of Hawsted," and in describing Hawsted Place, which was rebuilt about 1570, says that there was a small apartment called the smoking-room—"a name," he says, "it acquired probably soon after it was built; and which it retained with good reason, as long as it stood." I should like to know on what authority Sir John Cullum could have made the assertion that the room was called the smoking-room from so early a date as the end of the sixteenth century. No mention in print of a smoking-room has been found for the purposes of the Oxford Dictionary earlier than 1689. In Shadwell's "Bury Fair" of that date Lady Fantast says to her husband, Mr. Oldwit, who loves to tell of his early meetings with Ben Jonson and other literary heroes of a bygone day, "While all the Beau Monde, as my daughter says, are with us in the drawing-room, you have none but ill-bred, witless drunkards with you in your smoking-room." As Mr. Oldwit himself, in another scene of the same play, says to his friends, "We'll into my smoking-room and sport about a brimmer," there was probably some excuse for his wife's remark. These country smoking-rooms were known in later days as stone-parlours, the floor being flagged for safety's sake; and the "stone-parlour" in many a squire's house was the scene of much conviviality, including, no doubt, abundant smoking.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked-with unpleasant results. Campbell, in his "History of Virginia," says that Raleigh having offered her Majesty "some tobacco to smoke, after two or three whiffs she was seized with a nausea, upon observing which some of the Earl of Leicester's faction whispered that Sir Walter had certainly poisoned her. But her Majesty in a short while recovering made the countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe out among them." The Queen had no selfish desire to monopolize the novel sensations caused by smoking. An eighteenth-century writer, Oldys, in his "Life of Sir Walter Raleigh," declares that tobacco "soon became of such vogue in Queen Elizabeth's court, that some of the great ladies, as well as noblemen therein, would not scruple to take a pipe sometimes very sociably." But these stories rest on vague tradition, and probably have no foundation in fact.

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