Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

In this same book Thackeray says ironically—"Think of that den of abomination, which, I am told, has been established in some clubs, called the smoking-Room." The satirist was very familiar with the smoking-room at the club he loved well—the "Little G."—the Garrick. The original Garrick club-house was at 35 King Street, Covent Garden, where the club was founded in 1831. It had formerly been a quiet, old-fashioned family hotel, but apparently was not furnished with a smoking-room, for one of the first acts of the club, when they obtained possession of the house, was to build out over the "leads" a large and comfortable smoking-room. Shirley Brooks said that this room, which was reached by a long passage from the Strangers' Dining-room, "was not a cheerful apartment by daylight, and when empty, but which, at night and full, was thought the most cheerful apartment in Town." At other clubs of more fashion, perhaps, but certainly of less good-fellowship, smoking-rooms made their way more slowly. At White's, smoking was not allowed at all till 1845. The Alfred Club, founded in 1808, which Lord Byron described as pleasant—"a little too sober and literary, perhaps, but, on the whole, a decent resource on a rainy day," and which Sir William Fraser called "a sort of minor Athenæum," owed its death in 1855, if report be true, to a dispute about smoking. One section of the members wished for an improved smoking-room—they called the existing room, which was at the top of the house—an "infamous hole"—while the more old-fashioned and more influential members objected to any improvement. The latter carried the day, but the consequent loss of members ruined the club, which soon after ceased to exist. This secession must have been subsequent to that of the bishops, of whom at one time many were members, but who left, it is said, because of the introduction of a billiard-table!

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

An amusing example of the bragging "tobacconist" is pictured for us in Ben Jonson's "Bobadil." Bobadil may perhaps be somewhat of an exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from his pocket, declares that it is all that is left of seven pounds which he had bought only "yesterday was seven-night." A consumption of seven pounds of tobacco in eight days is a pretty "tall order"! Then he goes on to brag of its quality—your right Trinidado—and to assert that he had been in the Indies, where the herb grows, and where he himself and a dozen other gentlemen had for the space of one-and-twenty weeks known no other nutriment than the fume of tobacco. This again was tolerably "steep" even for this Falstaff-like braggart. He continues with more bombast in praise of the medicinal virtues of the herb—virtues which were then very firmly and widely believed in—and is replied to by Cob, the anti-tobacconist, who, with equal exaggeration on the other side, denounces tobacco, and declares that four people had died in one house from the use of it in the preceding week, and that one had "voided a bushel of soot"!

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