Gronow, the author of the well-known "Reminiscences." Gronow says that
the famous surgeon, Sir Astley Cooper, on one occasion perceiving that
he was fond of smoking, cautioned him against that habit, telling him
that it would, sooner or later, be the cause of his death. This must
have been before 1841, when Sir Astley died. Writing in the 'sixties
Gronow said: "If Sir Astley were now alive he would find everybody
with a cigar in his mouth: men smoke nowadays whilst they are occupied
in working or hunting, riding in carriages, or otherwise
employed"--which shows how the prejudice against outdoor smoking was
then breaking down. "During the experience of a long life, however,"
continued Gronow, "I never knew but one person of whom it was said
that smoking was the cause of his death: he was the son of an Irish
earl, and an attache at our embassy in Paris. But, alas! I have known
thousands who have been carried off owing to their love of the
bottle."
Thackeray, as the satirist of the foolish social prejudices against
smoking, was naturally an inveterate smoker himself. He died in 1863,
and so hardly saw the beginning of a change in the attitude of
society towards the pestilent weed; but he was one of the many men of
letters and artists, who, despising the conventions of society, were
largely instrumental in breaking down stupid restrictions, and in
overcoming senseless prejudices, and were thus heralds of freedom.
Charles Keene's attitude was that of many artists. He smoked a little
Jacobean clay pipe in his "sky-parlour" overlooking the Strand, and
did not care in the least what the world might think or not think
about that or any other subject.
Those who smoked pipes at Cambridge continued to smoke pipes
afterwards, whatever "society" might do. Spedding, who spent his life
on the elucidation of Bacon, was one of the "Apostles," and he
continued a pipe-lover to the end. In 1832 we hear of Tennyson being
in London with him, and "smoking all the day."
Lady Ritchie, in "Tennyson and his Friends," says: "I can remember
vaguely, on one occasion through a cloud of smoke, looking across a
darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet Laureate. He was
sitting with my Father in the twilight after some family meal in the
old house in Kensington." Thackeray was a cigar-smoker, but Tennyson
was a devotee of the pipe. It was on this occasion, as the poet
himself reminded Thackeray's daughter, that while the novelist was
speaking, Lady Ritchie's little sister "looked up suddenly from the
book over which she had been absorbed, saying in her sweet childish
voice, 'Papa, why do you not write books like 'Nicholas Nickleby'?'"
Tennyson wrote "In Memoriam" at Shawell Rectory, near Lutterworth,
Leicestershire. The rector was a Mr. Elmhirst, a native of the poet's
Lincolnshire village. The latest historian of Lutterworth says that
"The great puffs of tobacco smoke with which he [Tennyson] mellowed
his thoughts, proved insufferable to his host, and he was accordingly
turned out into Mr. Elmhirst's workshop in the garden, which in
consequence became the birthplace of one of the gems of English
literature."
About 1842, when Tennyson often dined at the Old Cock (by Temple Bar)
and at other taverns, the perfect dinner for his taste, says his son,
was "a beef-steak, a potato, a cut of cheese, a pint of port, and
afterwards a pipe (never a cigar)." When the Kingsleys paid the
Tennysons a visit about 1859, Charles Kingsley, so the Laureate told
his son, "talked as usual on all sorts of topics, and walked hard up
and down the study for hours smoking furiously, and affirming that
tobacco was the only thing that kept his nerves quiet." The late
Laureate, Alfred Austin, once asked Tennyson, after reading a passage
in Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journal" that William had gone to bed "very
tired" with writing the "Prelude," if he had ever felt tired by
writing poetry. "I think not," said the poet, "but tired with the
accompaniment of too much smoking."
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.
Carlyle, as every one knows, was a great smoker. The story is
familiar--it may be true--that one evening he and Tennyson sat in
solemn silence smoking for hours, one on each side of the fireplace,
and that when the visitor rose to go, Carlyle, as he bade him
good-night, said--"Man, Alfred, we hae had a graund nicht; come again
soon."
Tennyson's own devotion to tobacco led, on at least one occasion, to a
peculiar and somewhat questionable proceeding. Mr. W.M. Rossetti had a
temporary acquaintance with the poet, and in the "Reminiscences" which
he published in 1906, he told a curious anecdote concerning him which
was new to print. Rossetti told, on the authority of Woolner, how, in
the course of a trip with friends to Italy, tobacco such as Tennyson
could smoke gave out at some particular city, whereupon the poet
packed up his portmanteau and returned home, breaking up the party!
The late Joseph Knight, who reviewed Rossetti's volumes in the
_Athenaeum_, vouched for the truth of this relation, which he had
heard, not only from Woolner, but also from Tennyson's brother
Septimus.
In more fashionable circles the mere possession of a pipe might be
looked at askance. Robertson's comedy "Society" was produced in 1865,
and in it, Tom Stylus, a somewhat Bohemian journalist, has the
misfortune, in a fashionable ball-room, when pulling out his
handkerchief to bring out his pipe with it from his pocket. The vulgar
thing falls upon the floor, and Tom is ashamed to claim his property
and so acknowledge his ownership of a pipe. He presently calls a
footman, who comes with a tray and sugar-tongs, picks up the offending
briar with the tongs, and carries it off "with an air of ineffable
disgust."
Undergraduates, like men of letters, did not pay much attention to the
conventional attitude of society towards tobacco, and pipes maintained
their popularity in college rooms. Thackeray, in the "Book of Snobs,"
describes youths at a University wine-party as "drinking bad wines,
telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk
punch--smoking--ghastly headache--frightful spectacle of dessert-table
next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted
to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at
least too highly coloured. In the recently published memoir of
"J"--John Willis Clark--some reminiscences of the late Registrary are
included; and "J" does not recognize Thackeray's picture as quite true
of the "wines" of his undergraduate day, _i.e._ about 1850. "They
may," he says, "have 'told bad stories and sung bad songs,' as
Thackeray says in his 'Book of Snobs.' I can only say that I never
heard either the one or the other." But certainly there was noise, and
there was smoke--plenty of it. "Conversation there was none," says
"J," "only a noise. Then came smoke. In a short time the atmosphere
became dense, the dessert and the wine came to an end, and it was
chapel time (mercifully)." One story Clark tells of an extraordinary
attempt to smoke. Referring to the compulsory "chapels," he says that
as a rule everybody behaved with propriety, whether they regarded the
attendance as irksome or otherwise. But, he admits, "'Iniquity
Corner,' as the space at the east end on each side of the altar was
called, may occasionally have effectually sheltered card-playing; but
when a young snob went so far as to light a cigar there, he had the
pleasure of finishing it in the country, for he was rusticated. It was
on a cognate occasion in Jesus College, in which cobblers' wax played
a prominent part, that Dr. Corrie dismissed the culprit, after a
severe lecture, with these admirable words: 'Your conduct, sir, is
what a Christian would call profane, and a gentleman vulgar.'"
At Oxford, in November 1859, the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors issued
the following notice, which shows that an occasional outbreak of bad
manners might happen on the Isis as on the Cam: "Whereas complaints
have been made that some Undergraduate members of the University are
in the habit of smoking at _public entertainments_, and otherwise
creating annoyance, they are hereby cautioned against the repetition
of such ungentlemanlike conduct."
There was plenty of smoking among undergraduates at Oxford in those
days, as may be seen in such books as "The Adventures of Mr. Verdant
Green," and Hughes's "Tom Brown at Oxford," both of which date from
1861. When Tom, after a reading-bout, thought of going out--"there was
a wine party at one of his acquaintance's rooms; or he could go and
smoke a cigar in the pool-room, or at any one of a dozen other
places." Cigars were the fashionable form of smoke. When Tom offers
his box to Captain Hardy, that worthy's son says: "You might as well
give him a glass of absinthe. He is churchwarden at home, and can't
smoke anything but a long clay," with which the old sailor was
accordingly supplied.
A striking example of the attitude of the mid-nineteenth century days
towards tobacco may be found in connexion with railways and railway
travelling. In the early days of such travel there were no smoking
compartments, and indeed smoking was "strictly forbidden" practically
everywhere on railway premises. Relics of this time may still be seen
in many stations and on many platforms in the shape of somewhat dingy
placards announcing that smoking is strictly forbidden, and that the
penalty is so much. Nowadays the incense from pipes and cigars and
cigarettes curls freely round these obsolete notices and helps to make
them still dingier. If you wanted to smoke when travelling you had
either to contrive to get a compartment to yourself, or to arrange
terms with your fellow-travellers. In a _Punch_ of 1855, Leech drew a
railway-platform scene wherein figures one of those precocious
youngsters of a type he loved to draw. A railway porter says to his
mate, as the two gaze at the back of this small swell, with his cane
and top-hat, "What does he say, Bill?" "Why, he says he must have a
compartment to hisself, because he can't get on without his smoke!"
Another drawing in a _Punch_ of 1861 points the same moral. It
represents an elderly "party" and a "fast Etonian" seated side by side
in a first-class compartment. The latter has a cigar in one hand and
with the other offers coins to his neighbour; the explanation is as
follows: "_Old Party._ Really, sir,--I am the manager of the line,
sir--I must inform you that if you persist in smoking, you will be
fined forty shillings, sir. _Fast Etonian._ Well, old boy, I must have
my smoke; so you may as well take your forty shillings now!"
Tobacco was always popular in the army; and even the strongest of
anti-tobacconists would have felt that there was at least something,
if not much, to be said for the abused weed, when in times of
campaigning suffering it played so beneficent a part in soothing and
comforting weary and wounded men. The period covered by this chapter
included both the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, and every one
knows how the soldiers in the Crimea and in India alike craved for
tobacco as for one of the greatest of luxuries, and how even an
occasional smoke cheered and encouraged and sustained suffering
humanity. The late Dr. Norman Kerr, who was no friend to ordinary,
everyday smoking, wrote: "There are occasions, such as in the trenches
during military operations, when worn out with exposure and fatigue,
or when exhausted by slow starvation with no food in prospect, when a
pipe or cigar will be a welcome and valuable friend in need, resting
the weary limbs, cheering the fainting heart, allaying the gnawing
hunger of the empty stomach."
Sir G.W. Forrest, in his book on "The Indian Mutiny," tells how at the
siege of Lucknow, as the month of August advanced, "the tea and sugar,
except a small store kept for invalids, were exhausted. The tobacco
also was gone, and Europeans and natives suffered greatly from the
want of it. The soldiers yearned for a pipe after a hard day's work,
and smoked dry leaves as the only substitute they could obtain." Mr.
L.E.R. Rees in his diary of the same siege noted--"I have given up
smoking tobacco, and have taken to tea-leaves and neem-leaves, and
guava fruit-leaves instead, which the poor soldiers are also
constantly using." The neem-tree is better known, perhaps, as the
margosa. It yields a bitter oil, and is supposed to possess febrifugal
properties.
Among the general mass of the population in the early Victorian
period, smoking, though certainly not so all-prevailing as now, was
yet very common. It is highly probable that one of the things which
led to the great increase in pipe-smoking which took place from this
time onwards was the introduction of the briar pipe.
The earliest example of the use of a wooden pipe I have met with is
dated 1765--but this was not in England. Many years ago the late Mr.
A.J. Munby pointed out that Smollett, in one of his letters dated
March 18, 1765, giving an account of his journey from Nice to Turin,
describes how he ascended "the mountain Brovis," and on the top
thereof met a Quixotic figure, whom he thus pictures: "He was very
tall, meagre, and yellow, with a long hooked nose and twinkling eyes.
His head was cased in a woollen nightcap, over which he wore a flapped
hat; he had a silk handkerchief about his neck, and his mouth was
furnished with a short wooden pipe, from which he discharged wreathing
clouds of tobacco-smoke." This scarecrow turned out to be an Italian
marquis; and no doubt the singularity of his smoking apparatus was of
a piece with the singularity of his attire.
Mr. Munby, after this reference to Smollett's adventure, proceeded to
claim the honour of having helped to bring the use of wooden pipes
into England. In the year 1853 he wrote, "meerschaums and clays were
the rule at both the English universities and in all shops throughout
the land, and the art of making pipes of wood was either obsolete [it
had never been introduced] or wholly _in futuro_. But a college friend
of mine, a Norfolk squire, possessed a gardener who was of an
inventive turn, though he was not a Scotchman. This man conceived and
wrought out the idea of making pipes of willow-wood, cutting the bowl
out of a thick stem, and the tube out of a thinner one growing from
the bowl, so that the whole pipe was in one piece. Willow-wood is too
soft, so that the pipes did not last long; but they were a valuable
discovery, and the young squire's friends bought them eagerly at
eighteenpence apiece."
This experiment in the direction of wooden pipes was interesting, and
deserves to be remembered; but it was not long before the briar was
introduced and carried everything before it.
It was about 1859 that the use of the root of the White Heath (_Erica
arborea_), a native of the South of France, Corsica, and some other
localities, for the purpose of making tobacco-pipes was introduced
into this country. The word "brier" or "briar" has no connexion
whatever with the prickly, thorny briar which bears the lovely wild
rose. It is derived from the French _bruyere_, heath--the root of the
White Heath being the material known as "briar" or "brier," and at
first as "bruyer." The Oxford Dictionary quotes an advertisement from
the _Tobacco Trade Review_ of so recent a date as February 8, 1868, of
a "Heath Pipe: in Bruyer Wood." The briar pipe not only soon drove the
clay largely out of use, but immensely increased the number of
pipe-smokers. Bulwer Lytton may not have known the briar, but he wrote
enthusiastically of the pipe. Every smoker knows the glowing tribute
he paid to it in his "Night and Morning," which appeared in 1841. It
is terser and more to the point than most panegyrics: "A pipe! It is a
great soother, a pleasant comforter. Blue devils fly before its honest
breath. It ripens the brain, it opens the heart; and the man who
smokes thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan."
XI
LATER VICTORIAN DAYS
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.
The earliest references for the word "cigarette" in the Oxford
Dictionary are dated 1842 and 1843, but both refer to the smoking of
cigarettes abroad--in France and Italy. The 1843 quotation is from a
book by Mrs. Romer, in which she says--"The beggars in the streets
have paper cigars (called cigarettes) in their mouths." The wording
here would seem to show that cigarettes were not then familiar to
English people.
Laurence Oliphant, who was both a man of letters and a man of fashion,
is generally credited with the introduction into English society of
the cigarette; but it is difficult to suggest even an approximate
date. Writing from Boulogne to W.H. Wills in September 1854, Dickens
says, "I have nearly exhausted the cigarettes I brought here," and
proceeds to give directions for some to be sent to him from London.
This is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette-smoking in
England; but it is possible that by "cigarettes" Dickens meant not
what we now know as such, but simply small cigars. Mr. H.M. Hyndman,
in his "Record of an Adventurous Life," says that when he was living
as a pupil, about the year 1860, with the Rector of Oxburgh, his
fellow-pupils included "Edward Abbott of Salonica, who, poor fellow,
was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings
at the beginning of the Turco-Servian War. Cigarette-smoking, now so
popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the
finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself,
was the first devotee of this habit I encountered."
Fairholt, in his book on "Tobacco," which was published in 1859,
mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central
America, but makes no reference to their use in this country.
The late Lady Dorothy Nevill said that although cigarettes are a
modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly
different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "when old
Peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece
of paper. They called this a _papelito_, and I fancy it was much the
same thing as a cigarette." But if this were so, the habit must have
died out long before the cigarette, as we now know it, came into
vogue.
It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there
may have been an occasional cigarette-smoker in England, like the
Edward Abbott of Mr. Hyndman's reminiscences, yet it was not until a
little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls of tobacco
became at all common among Englishmen; and it is quite likely that the
credit (or discredit, as the reader pleases) of bringing them into
general, and especially into fashionable, use, has been rightly given
to Laurence Oliphant.
Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870. In "Puck," which was
published in that year, Ouida--who is hardly an unimpeachable
authority on the ways and customs of fashionable folk, though she
loved to paint fancy pictures of their sayings and doings--pictures
the Row: "the most fashionable lounge you have, but it is a Republic
for all that." There, she says, "could Bill Jacobs lean against a
rail, with a clay-pipe in his mouth, and a terrier under his arm,
close beside the Earl of Guilliadene, with his cigarette and his
eye-glass, and his Poole-cut habiliments."
Thirty years or more ago the late Andrew Lang wrote an article
entitled "Enchanted Cigarettes," which began--"To dream our literary
projects, Balzac says, is like 'smoking enchanted cigarettes,' but
when we try to tackle our projects, to make them real, the enchantment
disappears--we have to till the soil, to sow the weed, to gather the
leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manufactured, while there may
be no market for them after all. Probably most people have enjoyed
the fragrance of these cigarettes and have brooded over much which
they will never put on paper. Here are some of 'the ashes of the weeds
of my delight'--memories of romances whereof no single line is
written, or is likely to be written." What Balzac said in his "La
Cousine Bette" was--"Penser, rever, concevoir de belles oeuvres est
une occupation delicieuse. C'est fumer des cigares enchantes, c'est
mener la vie de la courtisane occupee a sa fantaisie." Balzac's cigars
became cigarettes in Lang's fantasy. The French novelist seems to have
been one of those who praised tobacco without using it much himself.
In his "Illusions Perdues" Carlos Herrera, who was Vautrin, says to
Lucien, whom he meets on the point of suicide: "Dieu nous a donne le
tabac pour endormir nos passions et nos douleurs." M.A. Le Breton,
however, in his book on Balzac--"L'Homme et L'OEuvre"--says: "Il ne
se soutient qu'a force de cafe," though he would sit working at his
desk for twenty-five hours running.
About the time that Lang's article was written, Sir F.C. Burnand's
burlesque, "Bluebeard" was produced at the Gaiety Theatre. In those
days a certain type of young man, since known by many names, including
the present day "nut," was called a "masher"; and Burnand's burlesque
included a duet with the refrain:
_We are mashers, we are,
As we smoke our cigar
And crawl along, never too quick;
We are mashers, you bet,
With the light cigarette
And the quite irreproachable stick._
Nowadays the cigarette is in such universal use, that it would be
impossible thus to associate it with any particular type of man, sane
or inane.
The late Bishop Mandell Creighton, of London, was an incessant smoker
of cigarettes. Mr. Herbert Paul, in his paper on the Bishop, says that
those who went to see him at Fulham on a Sunday afternoon always found
him, if they found him at all, "leisurely, chatty, hospitable, and
apparently without a care in the world. There was the family
tea-table, and there were the eternal cigarettes. The Bishop must have
paid a fortune in tobacco-duty." There is a side view of another
tobacco-lover in the "Note-Books" of Samuel Butler, the author of
"Erewhon." Creighton, after reading Butler's "Alps and Sanctuaries"
had asked the author to come and see him. Butler was in doubt whether
or not to go, and consulted his clerk, Alfred, on the matter. That
wise counsellor asked to look at the Bishop's letter, and then said:
"I see, sir, there is a crumb of tobacco in it; I think you can go."