Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

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."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Sir Walter Scott often smoked cigars, though he seems to have regarded it in the light of an indulgence to be half-apologized for. In his "Journal," July 4, 1829, he noted—"When I had finished my bit of dinner, and was in a quiet way smoking my cigar over a glass of negus, Adam Ferguson comes with a summons to attend him to the Justice Clerk's, where, it seems, I was engaged. I was totally out of case to attend his summons, redolent as I was of tobacco. But I am vexed at the circumstance. It looks careless, and, what is worse, affected; and the Justice is an old friend moreover." Tobacco in any form was suspect. A man might smoke a cigar, but he must not take the odour into the drawing-room of even an old friend.

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