Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Even so late as 1861 the attitude towards smoking was still much the same in some quarters. In that year a German scholar, Professor Franz von Holtzendorff, paid a visit to a country gentleman's house in Gloucestershire—Hardwicke Court. Later he printed an account of his experiences, a translation of which was published in this country in 1878. When the professor arrived, his host, the first greeting over, at once pointed out to him a secluded apartment—the one which he thought it most important for a German to know, namely, the smoking-room. "According to his idea," continued the professor, "every German has three national characteristics, smoking, singing, and Sabbath-breaking; the first and only idea in which I found him led astray by an abstract theory." Later, his hostess, explaining to him the method and routine of life in an English country-house, said that the ladies retired about eleven, while the gentlemen finished their day's work in the smoking-room—the secluded apartment—or enjoyed a cigar at the billiard-table; but a smoke in the billiard-room was only allowed if that room was not near the drawing-room or in the hall close by. "You must have often been surprised," she continued, "that we English ladies have such an invincible repugnance to tobacco smoke, but there is no dispensation from our rule of abstinence, except in those rooms which my husband has already pointed out to you."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

The highlander, as he existed within living memory at many shop doors, and as he still exists at a few, was and is the survivor of many similar wooden figures as trade signs. The wooden figure of a negro or "Indian" with gilt loin-cloth and feathered head, has already been mentioned as an old tobacconist's sign. In early Georgian days a tobacconist named John Bowden, who dealt in all kinds of snuff, and also in "Aloe, Pigtail, and Wild Tobacco; with all sorts of perfumer's goods, wholesale and retail," traded at the sign of "The Highlander and Black Boy" in Threadneedle Street, London. At York, in this present year, 1914, I came upon a brightly painted wooden figure of Napoleon in full uniform and snuff-box in hand, standing at the door of a small tobacco-shop. Another class of sign or emblem was represented by the "wooden midshipman," which many of us have seen in Leadenhall Street, and which Dickens made famous in "Dombey and Son." Sometimes the wooden figure of a sailor stood outside public-houses with such signs as "The Jolly Sailor"; and a black doll was long a familiar token of the loathly shop kept by the tradesmen mysteriously known as Marine Store Dealers. Images of this kind sometimes stood at the door, or in many cases were placed on brackets or swung from the lintels.

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