joins the jovial circle at the Magpie and Stump, he finds on his right
hand "a gentleman in a checked shirt and Mosaic studs, with a cigar in
his mouth," who expresses the hope that the newcomer does not "find
this sort of thing disagreeable." "Not in the least," replied Mr.
Pickwick, "I like it very much, although I am no smoker myself." "I
should be very sorry to say I wasn't," interposes another gentleman on
the opposite side of the table. "It's board and lodging to me, is
smoke." Mr. Pickwick glances at the speaker, and thinks that if it
were washing too, it would be all the better!
Later again when the "couple o' Sawbones," the medical students, Ben
Allen and Bob Sawyer, make their first appearance on the scene, they
are discovered in the morning seated by Mr. Wardle's kitchen fire,
smoking cigars; and it is significant of how smoking out of doors was
then regarded that Dickens, going on to describe Sawyer in detail,
refers to "that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which
is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout
and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian
names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious
description." Apparently in 1836 the only person who would allow
himself to be seen smoking in the street was of the kind naturally
inclined to do the other objectionable things mentioned. The same idea
runs through the allusions to tobacco in "Pickwick." Smoking was
undeniably vulgar. Mr. John Smauker, who introduces Sam Weller at the
"friendly swarry" of the Bath footmen, smokes a cigar "through an
amber tube"--cigar-holders were a novelty. When Mr. Pickwick is taken
to the house of Namby, the sheriffs' officer, the "principal features"
of the front parlour are "fresh sand and stale tobacco smoke." One of
the occupants of the room is a "mere boy of nineteen or twenty, who,
though it was yet barely ten o'clock, was drinking gin and water, and
smoking a cigar, amusements to which, judging from his inflamed
countenance, he had devoted himself pretty constantly for the last
year or two of his life." Tobacco-smoke pervades the Fleet prison. In
fact, to trace tobacco through the pages of "Pickwick" is to realize
vividly how vulgar if not vicious an accomplishment smoking was
considered by the fashionable world and how popular it was among the
nobodies of the unfashionable world.
Similar morals may be drawn from other works of fiction. The action
of the first chapters of Thackeray's "Pendennis" passes early in the
nineteenth century. In the third chapter Foker has a cigar in his
mouth as he strolls with Pen down the High Street of Chatteris. Old
Doctor Portman meets them and regards "with wonder Pen's friend, from
whose mouth and cigar clouds of fragrance issued, which curled round
the doctor's honest face and shovel hat. 'An old school-fellow of
mine, Mr. Foker,' said Pen. The doctor said 'H'm!' and scowled at the
cigar. He did not mind a pipe in his study, but the cigar was an
abomination to the worthy gentleman." The reverend gentleman in liking
his pipe was faithful to the traditional fondness for smoking of
parsons; but smoking must be in the study. To smoke in the street was
vulgar; and to smoke the newfangled cigar was worse.
Pendennis, when he comes home the first time from Oxbridge, brings
with him a large box of cigars of strange brand, which he smokes "not
only about the stables and greenhouses, where they were good" for his
mother's plants, and which were obviously places to which a man who
wished to smoke should betake himself, but in his own study, which
rather shocks his mother. Pen goes from bad to worse during his
University days, and, sad to say, one Sunday in the last long
vacation, the "wretched boy," instead of going to church, "was seen at
the gate of the Clavering Arms smoking a cigar, in the face of the
congregation as it issued from St. Mary's. There was an awful
sensation in the village society. Portman prophesied Pen's ruin after
that, and groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal." Later
the smoke from Warrington's short pipe and Pen's cigars floats through
many pages of the novel.
X
EARLY VICTORIAN DAYS
Scent to match thy rich perfume
Chemic art did ne'er presume
Through her quaint alembic strain,
None so sovereign to the brain.
LAMB, _A Farewell to Tobacco._
The social attitude towards smoking in early Victorian days, and for
some time later, was curious. The development of cigar-smoking among
those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished,
and the natural consequent spread downwards of the use of cigars--in
accordance with the invariable law of fashion--together with the
continued devotion to the pipe among those whose love of tobacco had
never slackened, made smoking a much more general practice than it had
been for some generations.
It is somewhat significant that Dickens, in the "Old Curiosity Shop,"
1840, makes that repulsive dwarf, Quilp, smoke cigars. When the little
monster comes home unexpectedly in the fourth chapter of the book, and
breaks up his wife's tea-party, he settles himself in an
arm-chair--"with his large head and face squeezed up against the back,
and his little legs planted on the table"--with a case-bottle of rum,
cold water, and a box of cigars before him. "Now, Mrs. Quilp," he
says, "I feel in a smoking humour, and shall probably blaze away all
night. But sit where you are, if you please, in case I want you."
Quilp smokes cigars one after the other, his wretched wife sitting
patiently by, from sunset till some time after daybreak. The dwarf's
tastes, however, were catholic. A little later in the book the reader
finds him, when encamped in the back parlour of the old man's shop,
smoking pipe after pipe, and compelling that knavish attorney, Sampson
Brass, to do the same. Tobacco-smoke always caused Brass "great
internal discomposure and annoyance"; but this made no difference to
Quilp, who insisted on his "friend" continuing to smoke, while he
inquired: "Is it good, Brass, is it nice, is it fragrant, do you feel
like the Grand Turk?" But Quilp and Brass were not in "society."
Notwithstanding that the number of smokers had so largely increased,
and was continually increasing, smoking was regarded socially as
something of a vice--to be practised in inconvenient places and not
too publicly.
There were still plenty of active opponents and denouncers of tobacco.
One of the most distinguished was the great Duke of Wellington, who
abominated smoking, and was annoyed by the increase of cigar-smoking
among officers of the army. In the early 'forties he issued a General
Order (No. 577) which contained a paragraph that would have delighted
the heart of King James I. It ran thus: "The Commander-in-Chief has
been informed, that the practice of smoking, by the use of pipes,
cigars, or cheroots, has become prevalent among the Officers of the
Army, which is not only in itself a species of intoxication
occasioned by the fumes of tobacco, but, undoubtedly, occasions
drinking and tippling by those who acquire the habit; and he intreats
the Officers commanding Regiments to prevent smoking in the Mess Rooms
of their several Regiments, and in the adjoining apartments, and to
discourage the practice among the Officers of Junior Rank in their
Regiments."
The Duke's prejudices were stronger than his facts. The statement, not
very grammatically expressed, that "the practice of smoking" was
"itself a species of intoxication" was absurd enough; but the
allegation, introduced by a question-begging "undoubtedly," that
smoking occasioned drinking was directly contrary to fact. It was the
introduction of after-dinner smoking that largely helped to kill the
bad old practice of continued after-dinner drinking.
Perhaps the best reflection of and comment upon the attitude of
society towards smoking is to be found in the ironical, satirical
pages of Thackeray. Let the reader turn to the confessions of George
Fitz-Boodle Esq.--the "Fitz-Boodle Papers" first appeared in _Fraser's
Magazine_ for 1842--and he will find how smoking was regarded at that
date, and what Thackeray, speaking through the puppet Fitz-Boodle,
thought of it. George starts by saying: "I am not, in the first place,
what is called a ladies' man, having contracted an irrepressible habit
of smoking after dinner, which has obliged me to give up a great deal
of the dear creatures' society; nor can I go much to country-houses
for the same reason." The ladies had a keen scent for the abominable
odour of tobacco, and distrusted the men who smoked. Here is
Fitz-Boodle's, or Thackeray's, comment on it--"What is this smoking
that it should be considered a crime? I believe in my heart that women
are jealous of it, as of a rival. They speak of it as of some secret
awful vice that seizes upon a man, and makes him a pariah from genteel
society. I would lay a guinea that many a lady who has just been kind
enough to read the above lines lays down the book, after this
confession of mine that I am a smoker, and says, 'Oh, the vulgar
wretch!' and passes on to something else." He goes on to prophesy--and
for once the "most gratuitous of follies" has been justified by the
event--that tobacco will conquer. "Look over the wide world," he says
to the ladies, "and see that your adversary has overcome it. Germany
has been puffing for three score years; France smokes to a man. Do you
think you can keep the enemy out of England? Psha! look at his
progress. Ask the club-houses, Have they smoking-rooms, or not? Are
they not obliged to yield to the general want of the age, in spite of
the resistance of the old women on the committees? I, for my part, do
not despair to see a bishop lolling out of the 'Athenaeum' with a
cheroot in his mouth, or, at any rate, a pipe stuck in his
shovel-hat."
The flight of fancy in the last sentence has hardly yet been
fulfilled; but I saw, many years ago, a distinguished man of letters,
the late Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave, of "Golden Treasury" fame, who
was an inveterate smoker, sitting on one of the cane benches by the
door of the Athenaeum Club, smoking a short clay pipe.
Thackeray does not appear to have realized that tobacco was not
invading England for the first, but for the second time, nor did he
foresee that the ladies, to whom he addressed his impassioned defence
of smoking, would not only submit to the conqueror but would
themselves be found among his joyous devotees.
George Fitz-Boodle recounts how, as a boy, he was flogged for smoking,
and how, at Oxford, smoking among other villainies led to his
rustication. Later his tobacco, combined with insolence to his
tobacco-hating colonel, conducted him out of the army into the
retirement of civil life; and so on and so on. There is, of course, an
element of exaggeration in all this; but Mr. Fitz-Boodle's experiences
and reflections throw much light on the social history of smoking in
the early decades of the nineteenth century. Mr. Harry Furniss, in the
preface to his edition of Thackeray, has an admirably terse and
pertinent paragraph on this aspect of the "Fitz-Boodle Papers." He
says--"No gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a 'weed' in
the streets. Cigarettes were practically unheard of in England, and
outside one's private smoking-room pipes were tabooed. Men in Society
slunk into their smoking-rooms, or, when there was no smoking-room,
into the kitchen or servants' hall, after the domestics had retired. A
smoking-jacket was worn in the place of their ordinary evening coat,
and their well-oiled, massive head of hair was protected by a
gorgeously decorated smoking-cap. Thus the odour of tobacco was not
brought into the drawing-room."
The fear of the odour of tobacco-smoke was extraordinary. Mr. J.C.
Buckmaster in his reminiscences describes the famous debating society
at Cogers' Hall, and says that "after one night at the Cogers' it took
three days on a common to purify your clothes" from the smoke. The
journalists and Bohemians who met at the Cogers were above (or below)
the dictates of fashion, and smoking was always a feature of their
gatherings. The "yard of clay" is provided gratis for members, and it
is to its almost universal use, says Mr. Peter Rayleigh, in his book
on "The Cogers and Fleet Street," "that Cogers owe their existence in
the present quarters. Once upon a time the Cogers 'swarmed' to a
well-appointed room, where carpets covered the floors, the chairs were
upholstered, and the tables had finely polished marble tops. The hot
pipes and smouldering matches stained the table tops and burnt the
carpets, so that they had the option of abandoning either the pipe or
the quarters. Old customs die hard with Cogers, and they stuck to
their pipe.... The pipe is a feature in all illustrations of Cogerian
meetings."
The influence of the Court was wholly against smoking. Both Queen
Victoria and the Prince Consort detested it, so tobacco was taboo
wherever the Court was. The late Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived to see
the new triumph of tobacco, said that she thought the greatest minor
change in social habits which she had witnessed was that in the
attitude assumed towards smoking, which, in her youth, "and even
later, was, except in certain well-defined circumstances, regarded as
little less than a heinous crime." Lady Dorothy remarked that
"smoking-rooms in country houses were absolutely unknown"--but that
was not quite correct as we shall see in the experiences of Professor
von Holtzendorff, to be mentioned directly--and that "such gentlemen
as wished to smoke after the ladies had gone to bed used, as a matter
of course, to go either to the servants' hall or to the harness-room
in the stables, where at night some sort of rough preparation was
generally made for their accommodation.... Well do I remember the
immense care which devotees of tobacco used to take, when sallying
forth in the country to enjoy it, not to allow the faintest whiff of
smoke to penetrate into the hall as they lit their cigars at the
door."
In 1845 Dickens wrote: "I generally take a cigar after dinner when I'm
alone." The reservation in the last three words may be noted. In the
"Book of Snobs," Major Wellesley Ponto goes to smoke a cigar in the
stables--Ponto had no smoking-room--with Lord Gules, who is described
as a "very young, short, sandy-haired and tobacco-smoking nobleman,
who cannot have left the nursery very long." Later, Ponto and Gules
"resume smoking operations ... in the now vacant kitchen."
Even so late as 1861 the attitude towards smoking was still much the
same in some quarters. In that year a German scholar, Professor Franz
von Holtzendorff, paid a visit to a country gentleman's house in
Gloucestershire--Hardwicke Court. Later he printed an account of his
experiences, a translation of which was published in this country in
1878. When the professor arrived, his host, the first greeting over,
at once pointed out to him a secluded apartment--the one which he
thought it most important for a German to know, namely, the
smoking-room. "According to his idea," continued the professor, "every
German has three national characteristics, smoking, singing, and
Sabbath-breaking; the first and only idea in which I found him led
astray by an abstract theory." Later, his hostess, explaining to him
the method and routine of life in an English country-house, said that
the ladies retired about eleven, while the gentlemen finished their
day's work in the smoking-room--the secluded apartment--or enjoyed a
cigar at the billiard-table; but a smoke in the billiard-room was only
allowed if that room was not near the drawing-room or in the hall
close by. "You must have often been surprised," she continued, "that
we English ladies have such an invincible repugnance to tobacco smoke,
but there is no dispensation from our rule of abstinence, except in
those rooms which my husband has already pointed out to you."
The professor, after luncheon, was pressed by the squire--"who, on any
other occasion would never waste time in smoking, and only filled his
short clay pipe at the end of his day's work"--to come to his
smoking-room. As regards this room the professor drily remarked--"I
thought I had noticed that even the key-hole was stopped up, in order
to preserve the ladies' delicate nerves from every disagreeable
sensation." After dinner, again, when the ladies had left the table,
"the gentlemen passed the bottles of port, sherry, and claret, with
the regularity of planets from hand to hand," but no one dreamed of
smoking. That was reserved for the secluded apartment after the ladies
had gone to bed. Neither host nor guest imagined what a revolution
another generation or so would make in these social habits.
In the 'fifties the pipes smoked were mostly clays. There were the
long clays or "churchwardens," to be smoked in hours of ease and
leisure; and the short clays--"cutties"--which could be smoked while a
man was at work. Milo, a tobacconist in the Strand, and Inderwick,
whose shop was near Leicester Square, were famous for their pipes,
which could be bought for 6d. apiece. A burlesque poem of 1853, in
praise of an old black pipe, says:
_Think not of meerschaum is that bowl: away,
Ye fond enthusiasts! it is common clay,
By Milo stamped, perchance by Milo's hand,
And for a tizzy purchased in the Strand._
_Famed are the clays of Inderwick, and fair
The pipes of Fiolet from Saint Omer._
I am indebted for this quotation to a correspondent of _Notes and
Queries_, September 27, 1913.
Another correspondent of the same journal, Colonel W.F. Prideaux, also
replying to a query of mine, wrote: "Before briar-root pipes came into
common use clay pipes were of necessity smoked by all classes. When I
matriculated at Oxford at the Easter of 1858 ... University men used
to be rather particular about the pipes they smoked. The finest were
made in France, and the favourite brand was 'Fiolet, Saint Omer.' I do
not know if this kind is still smoked, but it was made of a soft clay
that easily coloured. In taverns, of course, the churchwarden--beloved
of Carlyle and Tennyson--was usually smoked to the accompaniment of
shandygaff. At Simpson's fish ordinary at Billingsgate these pipes
were always placed on the table after dinner, together with screws of
shag tobacco, and a smoking parliament moistened with hot or cold
punch according to the season, was generally held during the following
hour. Of course, in those days no one ever thought of smoking a pipe
in the presence of ladies."
Colonel Harold Malet at the same time wrote--"When I was a cadet at
Sandhurst in 1855-58, Milo's cutty pipes were quite the thing, and the
selection by cadets of a good one out of a fresh consignment packed
in sawdust was eagerly watched by the 'Johns.' Of course we were
imitating our parents." It was no doubt these cutty pipes which are
referred to in one of the sporting books of Robert Surtees as the
"clay pipes of gentility."
In a private letter to me, which I am privileged to quote, Colonel
Prideaux adds some further particulars as to the social attitude of
early Victorian days towards tobacco--particulars which are the more
valuable and interesting as being supplied from personal recollection
of those now somewhat distant days. The Colonel writes: "When I was a
young man people never thought of smoking in what house-agents call
the 'reception-rooms,' the principal reason being that the occupation
of these rooms was shared by ladies, and it was 'bad form' (not, by
the way, a contemporary expression) to smoke while in the company of
the fairer half of creation. Consequently, men had either to indulge
in the practice out of doors, or else, as you say, sneak away to the
kitchen when the servants had gone to bed, and puff up the chimney. It
was only in large houses that a billiard room could be found, and even
in a billiard room a pipe or cigar was _taboo_ if ladies were present,
while smoking-rooms could no more be found in middle-class houses than
bath-rooms. Both cutties and churchwardens were smoked, but the latter
of course were not adapted for persons engaged in active pursuits and
were essentially of what I may call a sedentary nature. You could not
even walk while holding a long churchwarden in your mouth, and
consequently the short clay was most favoured by young men at
Sandhurst and the Universities.... Labourers smoked short clays when
out of doors, and churchwardens when they rested from their labours
and took their ease in their inn in the evenings."
Mr. Furniss, in the paragraph quoted on a previous page, says: "No
gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a 'weed' in the
streets." The nearest approach to this seems to have been smoking on
club steps. Thackeray, in the seventeenth chapter of the "Book of
Snobs," speaks of dandies smoking their cigars upon the steps of
"White's," most fashionable of clubs, and, in an earlier chapter, of
young Ensign Famish lounging and smoking on the steps of the "Union
Jack Club," with half a dozen other "young rakes of the fourth or
fifth order." Two of Thackeray's own drawings in the "Book of
Snobs"--in chapters three and nine--show men, one civil the other
military, smoking cigars out of doors; but as these were no doubt
arrant snobs, the drawings may be accepted as proof of Mr. Furniss's
statement.
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 Athenaeum," 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!
The growth of cigar-smoking was rapid. Mr. Steinmetz, in his book on
"Tobacco," published in 1857, remarked that no way of using tobacco
had made a more striking advance in England within the preceding
twenty years than cigars. For a long time it had been confined in this
country to the richer class of smokers, but when he wrote it was "in
universal use." The wonder is that with so many men smoking cigars the
old domestic and club restrictions, as pilloried in Thackeray's pages,
were maintained so long. In 1853 Leech had an admirably drawn sketch
in _Punch_ of paterfamilias, in the absence of his wife, giving a
little dinner. Beside him sits his small son, and on either side of
the table sit two of his cronies. One has a cigar in his hand and is
blowing a cloud of smoke, while the other is selecting a "weed." The
host is just lighting his cigar as the maid enters with a tray of
decanters and glasses, and with disgust written plainly on her face.
The objectionable child beside him says--"Lor! Pa, are you going to
smoke? My eye! won't you catch it when Ma comes home, for making the
curtains smell!"