Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

Fielding himself smoked his pipe. When his play "The Wedding Day" was produced by Garrick in 1743, various suggestions were made to the author as to the excision of certain passages, and the modification of one of the scenes. Garrick pressed for certain omissions, but—"No, damn them," said Fielding, "if the scene is not a good one, let them find that out"; and then, according to Murphy, he retired to the green-room, where, during the progress of the play, he smoked his pipe and drank champagne. Presently he heard the sound of hissing, and when Garrick came in and explained that the audience had hissed the scene he had wished to have modified, all Fielding said was: "Oh, damn them, they have found it out, have they!"

Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, the crafty old Jacobite who took part in the rising of 1745 and who was executed on Tower Hill in 1747, was a smoker. The pipe which he was reported to have smoked on the evening before his execution, together with his snuff-box and a canvas tobacco-bag, were for many years in the possession of the Society of Cogers, the famous debating society of Fleet Street.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

Sir Walter Scott said that in London a Scotchman would walk half a mile farther to purchase his ounce of snuff where the sign of the Highlander announced a North Briton.

Dickens's little figure, which adorned old Sol Gills's shop, "thrust itself out above the pavement, right leg foremost," with shoe buckles and flapped waistcoat very much unlike the real thing, and "bore at its right eye the most offensively disproportionate piece of machinery." But this was only one of many "little timber midshipmen in obsolete naval uniforms, eternally employed outside the shop-doors of nautical instrument-makers in taking observations of the hackney-coaches." All have disappeared, together with the black dolls of the rag shops and many other old-time figures. A stray highlander or two, or other figure, may survive here and there; but with very few exceptions indeed, the once abundant tobacconists' signs have disappeared from our streets as completely as the emblemsand tokens of other trades.

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