The Social History of Smoking eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about The Social History of Smoking.

The Social History of Smoking eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about The Social History of Smoking.
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.

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The Social History of Smoking from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.