The old Irishwomen who were once a familiar feature of London street-life as sellers of apples and other small wares at street corners, were often hardened smokers; and so were, and doubtless still are, many of the gipsy women who tramp the country.  An old Seven Dials ballad has the following choice stanza—­

    When first I saw Miss Bailey,
        ’Twas on a Saturday,
    At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,
        And smoking a yard of clay.

Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign female smoking in the nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned.  Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be whispered that here and there a lady—­who was usually considered dreadfully “fast” for her pains—­was accustomed to venture upon a cigarette.

In “Puck,” 1870, Ouida represented one of her beautiful young men, Vy Bruce, as “murmuring idlest nonsense to Lilian Lee, as he lighted one of his cigarettes for her use”—­but Lilian Lee was a cocotte.

An amusing incident is related in Forster’s “Life of Dickens,” which shows how entirely unknown was smoking among women of the middle and upper classes in England some ten years after Queen Victoria came to the throne.  Dickens was at Lausanne and Geneva in the autumn of 1846.  At his hotel in Geneva he met a remarkable mother and daughter, both English, who admired him greatly, and whom he had previously known at Genoa.  The younger lady’s conversation would have shocked the prim maids and matrons of that day.  She asked Dickens if he had ever “read such infernal trash” as Mrs. Gore’s; and exclaimed “Oh God! what a sermon we had here, last Sunday.”  Dickens and his two daughters—­“who were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards”—­dined by invitation with the mother and daughter.  The daughter asked him if he smoked.  “Yes,” said Dickens, “I generally take a cigar after dinner when I’m alone.”  Thereupon said the young lady, “I’ll give you a good ’un when we go upstairs.”  But the sequel must be told in the novelist’s own inimitable style.  “Well, sir,” he wrote, “in due course we went upstairs, and there we were joined by an American lady residing in the same hotel ... also a daughter ...  American lady married at sixteen; American daughter sixteen now, often mistaken for sisters, &c. &c. &c.  When that was over, the younger of our entertainers brought out a cigar-box, and gave me a cigar, made of negrohead she said, which would quell an elephant in six whiffs.  The box was full of cigarettes—­good large ones, made of pretty strong tobacco; I always smoke them here, and used to smoke them at Genoa, and I knew them well.  When I lighted my cigar, daughter lighted hers, at mine; leaned against the mantelpiece, in