Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Mr. Furniss, in the paragraph quoted on a previous page, says: "No gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a 'weed' in the streets." The nearest approach to this seems to have been smoking on club steps. Thackeray, in the seventeenth chapter of the "Book of Snobs," speaks of dandies smoking their cigars upon the steps of "White's," most fashionable of clubs, and, in an earlier chapter, of young Ensign Famish lounging and smoking on the steps of the "Union Jack Club," with half a dozen other "young rakes of the fourth or fifth order." Two of Thackeray's own drawings in the "Book of Snobs"—in chapters three and nine—show men, one civil the other military, smoking cigars out of doors; but as these were no doubt arrant snobs, the drawings may be accepted as proof of Mr. Furniss's statement.

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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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