Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Some men seem to act upon Mark Twain's principle of never smoking when asleep or at meals, and never refraining at any other time. But excess is self-condemned. There is no good reason why anyone, for social or any other reasons, should look askance at the reasonable use of tobacco. "But used in moderation, what evils, let me ask,"—I again quote Dr. Andrew Wilson's calm good sense—"are to be found in the train of the tobacco-habit! A man doesn't get delirium tremens even if he smokes more than is good for him; he doesn't become a debased mortal; there is nothing about tobacco which makes a man beat his wife or assault his mother-in-law—rather the reverse, in fact, for tobacco is a soother and a quietener of the passions, and many a man, I daresay, has been prevented from doing rash things in the way of retaliation, when he has lit his pipe and had a good think over his affairs. Whenever anybody counterblasts to-day against tobacco, I feel as did my old friend Wilkie Collins, when somebody told him that to smoke was a wrong thing. 'My dear sir,' said the great novelist, 'all your objections to tobacco only increase the relish with which I look forward to my next cigar!'"

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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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