conversation with me; put out her stomach, folded
her arms, and with her pretty face cocked up sideways
and her cigarette smoking away like a Manchester cotton
mill, laughed, and talked, and smoked, in the most
gentlemanly manner I ever beheld. Mother immediately
lighted her cigar; American lady immediately lighted
hers; and in five minutes the room was a cloud of
smoke, with us four in the centre pulling away bravely,
while American lady related stories of her ‘Hookah’
upstairs, and described different kinds of pipes.
But even this was not all. For presently two Frenchmen
came in, with whom, and the American lady, daughter
sat down to whist. The Frenchmen smoked of course
(they were really modest gentlemen and seemed dismayed),
and daughter played for the next hour or two with a
cigar continually in her mouth—never out
of it. She certainly smoked six or eight.
Mother gave in soon—I think she only did
it out of vanity. American lady had been smoking
all the morning. I took no more; and daughter
and the Frenchmen had it all to themselves. Conceive
this in a great hotel, with not only their own servants,
but half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and
out! I showed no atom of surprise, but I never
was so surprised, so ridiculously taken aback,
in my life; for in all my experience of ‘ladies’
of one kind and another, I never saw a woman—not
a basket woman or a gipsy—smoke before!”
This last remark is highly significant. Forster
says that Dickens “lived to have larger and
wider experience, but there was enough to startle
as well as amuse him in the scene described.”
The words “cigar” and “cigarette”
are used indifferently by the novelist, but it seems
clear from the description and from the number smoked
by the lady in an hour or two, that it was a cigarette
and not a cigar, properly so called, which was never
out of her mouth.
The ladies who so surprised Dickens were English and
American, but at the period in question—the
early ’forties of the last century—one
of the freaks of fashion at Paris was the giving of
luncheon parties for ladies only, at which cigars
were handed round.
The first hints of feminine smoking in England may
be traced, like so many other changes in fashion,
in the pages of Punch. In 1851, steady-going
folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived
outburst of “bloomerism,” imported from
the United States. Of course it was at once suggested
that women who would go so far as to imitate masculine
attire and to emancipate themselves from the usual
conventions of feminine dress, would naturally seek
to imitate men in other ways also. Leech had
a picture of “A Quiet Smoke” in Punch,
which depicted five ladies in short wide skirts and
“bloomers” in a tobacconist’s shop,
two smoking cigars and one a pipe, while “one
of the inferior animals” behind the counter
was selling tobacco. But this was satire and
hardly had much relation to fact.