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: Whether the use of tobacco prevailed as generally among the Cavalier forces is less certain; but as King Charles hated the weed, courtiers may have frowned upon its use. One distinguished cavalier, however, either smoked his pipe, or proposed to do so, on a historic occasion. In Markham's "Life of the Great Lord Fairfax" there is a lively account of how the Duke, then Marquis, of Newcastle, with his brother Charles Cavendish, drove in a coach and six to the field of Marston Moor on the afternoon before the battle. His Grace was in a very bad humour. "He applied to Rupert," says Markham, "for orders as to the disposal of his own most noble person, and was told that there would be no battle that night, and that he had better get into his coach and go to sleep, which he accordingly did." But the decision as to battle or no battle did not rest with Prince Rupert. Cromwell attacked the royal army with the most disastrous results to the King's cause. His Grace of Newcastle woke up, left his coach, and fought bravely, being, according to his Duchess, the last to ride off the fatal field, leaving his coach and six behind him.
From Chapter 5: The belief in the prophylactic power of tobacco was, however, very generally held. When Mr. Samuel Pepys on June 7, 1665, for the first time saw several houses marked with the ominous red cross, and the words "Lord, have mercy upon us" chalked upon the doors, he felt so ill at ease that he was obliged to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew. There is nothing to show that Pepys even smoked, which considering his proficiency in the arts of good-fellowship, is perhaps a little surprising. Defoe, in his fictitious but graphic "Journal of the Plague Year in London," says that the sexton of one of the London parishes, who personally handled a large number of the victims, never had the distemper at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and was sexton of the parish to the time of his death. This man, according to Defoe, "never used any preservative against the infection other than holding garlic and rue in his mouth, and smoking tobacco."
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