Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 4: There is a curious entry in Thomas Burton's diary of the proceedings of Cromwell's Parliament, which suggests that there may then have been the luxury of a members' smoking-room. Burton was a member of the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell from 1656 to 1659, and made a practice—for which historical students have been and are much his debtors—of taking notes of the debates as he sat in the House. Members sometimes objected to and protested against this note-taking, but Burton quietly went on using his pencil, and though his summaries of speeches are often difficult to follow, argument and sense suffering by compression, he has preserved much very valuable matter. Referring to a debate on January 7, 1656-57, on an attempt to go behind the previously passed Act of Oblivion, the diarist records that "Sir John Reynolds had numbered the House, and said at rising there were 220 at the least, besides tobacconists." This can only mean that there were at least 220 members actually present in the House when it rose, not counting the "tobacconists" or smokers, who were enjoying their pipes, not in the Chamber itself, but in some conveniently adjoining place, which may have been a room for the purpose, or may simply have been the lobby referred to above in the extract from "Mercurius Pragmaticus."
From Chapter 6: There was indeed no diminution of tobacco-smoke in the coffee-houses. A visitor from abroad, Mr. Muralt, a Swiss gentleman, writing about 1696, said that character could be well studied at the coffee-houses. He was probably not a smoker himself, for he goes on to say that in other respects the coffee-houses are "loathsome, full of smoke like a guardroom, and as much crowded." He further observed that it was common to see the clergy of London in coffee-houses and even in taverns, with pipes in their mouths. A native witness of about the same date, Ned Ward, writes sneeringly in his "London Spy," 1699, of the interior of the coffee-house. He saw "some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jingling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot, or a boatswain's cabin.... We each of us stuck in our mouths a pipe of sotweed, and now began to look about us." Ward's contemporary, Tom Brown, took a different tone: he wrote of "Tobacco, Cole and the Protestant Religion, the three great blessings of life!"—as strange a jumble as one could wish for.
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