Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

Another eighteenth-century clerical worthy, the famous Dr. Parr, an inveterate smoker, was accustomed to do what Mr. Disney prevented Archbishop Blackburn from doing—he smoked in his vestry at Hatton. This he did before the sermon, while the congregation were singing a hymn, and apparently both parties were pleased, for Parr would say: "My people like long hymns; but I prefer a long clay."

Robert Hall, the famous Baptist preacher, having once upon a time strongly denounced smoking as an "odious custom," learned to smoke himself as a result of his acquaintance with Dr. Parr. Parr was such a continual smoker that anyone who came into his company, if he had never smoked before, had to learn the use of a pipe as a means of self-defence. Hall, who became a heavy smoker, is said to have smoked in his vestry at intervals in the service. He probably found some relief in tobacco from the severe internal pains with which for many years he was afflicted.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

By 1830 smoking had so far "come in" again that a considerable proportion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers. Macaulay has drawn for us the not very attractive picture of the smoking-room of the old House of Commons—before the fire of 1834—in a letter to his sister dated in the summer of 1831. "I have left Sir Francis Burdett on his legs," he wrote, "and repaired to the smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen (tell it not to the West Indians), Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open, and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself." In July 1832 he again dated a letter to his sisters from the House of Commons smoking-room. "I am writing here," he says, "at eleven at night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres ... with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils.... Reject not my letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room—

The room,—but I think I'll describe it in rhyme,
That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime.
The smell of tobacco was always the same:
But the chloride was bought since the cholera came."

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