Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

The number of shops where tobacco was sold in the early days of its triumph seems to have been extraordinary. Barnaby Rich, one of the most prolific parents of pamphlets in an age of prolific writers, wrote a satire on "The Honestie of this Age," which was printed in 1614. In this production Rich declares that every fellow who came into an ale-house and called for his pot, must have his pipe also, for tobacco was then a commodity as much sold in every tavern, inn and ale-house as wine, ale, or beer. He goes on to say that apothecaries' shops, grocers' shops, and chandlers' shops were (almost) never without company who from morning to night were still taking tobacco; and what a number there are besides, he adds, "that doe keepe houses, set open shoppes, that have no other trade to live by but by the selling of tobacco." Rich says he had been told that a list had been recently made of all the houses that traded in tobacco in and near about London, and that if a man might believe what was confidently reported, there were found to be upwards of 7000 houses that lived by that trade; but he could not say whether the apothecaries', grocers' and chandlers' shops, where tobacco was also sold, were included in that number. He proceeds to calculate what the annual expenditure on smoke must be. The number of 7000 seems very large and is perhaps exaggerated. Round numbers are apt to be over rather than under the mark.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 4:

On weekdays many New England Puritans probably smoked as their friends in old England did. A contemporary painting of a group of Puritan divines over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of Newbury, shows them well provided with punch-bowl and drinking-cups, tobacco and pipes. One parson, the Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of Charlestown, was very unconventional in his attire. He seldom wore a coat, "but generally appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth." John Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the Indians, warmly denounced both the wearing of wigs and the smoking of tobacco. But his denunciations were ineffectual in both matters—heads continued to be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and pipe-smoke continued to ascend.

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