Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Kingsley's devotion to smoke seems to have surprised Tennyson, who was no light smoker himself. The most curious story illustrating Kingsley's love of tobacco is that told in the life of Archbishop Benson by his son, Mr. A.C. Benson. One day about the year 1860, the future archbishop was walking with the Rector of Eversley in a remote part of the parish, on a common, when Kingsley suddenly said—"I must smoke a pipe," and forthwith went to a furze-bush and felt about in it for a time. Presently he produced a clay churchwarden pipe, "which he lighted, and solemnly smoked as he walked, putting it when he had done into a hole among some tree roots, and telling my father that he had a cache of pipes in several places in the parish to meet the exigencies of a sudden desire for tobacco." If this story did not appear in the life of an archbishop, some scepticism on the part of the reader might be excused.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

When life was all a summer day,
And I was under twenty,
Three loves were scattered in my way-
And three at once are plenty.
Three hearts, if offered with a grace,
One thinks not of refusing.
The task in this especial case
Was only that of choosing.
I knew not which to make my pet-
My pipe, cigar, or cigarette.
- Henry S. Leigh.

The social history of smoking in later Victorian days is marked by the triumph of the cigarette. The introduction of the cigar, as we have seen, brought about the revival of smoking, from the point of view of fashion, in the early decades of the nineteenth century; and the coming of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun.

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