Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

Although smoking was general among parsons, yet attacks on tobacco were occasionally heard from pulpits. A Lancashire preacher named Thomas Jollie, who was one of the ministers ejected from Church livings by the Act of Uniformity, 1662, has left a manuscript diary relating to his religious work. In it, under date 1687, he mentions that he had spoken "against the inordinate affection to and the immoderate use of tobacco which did caus much trouble in some of my hearers and some reformation did follow." He then goes on to record two remarkable examples of such "reformation"—examples, he says, "which did stirr me up in that case more than ordinary. The one I had from my reverend Brother Mr. Robert Whittaker, concerning a professor [i.e. a person who professed to have been "converted"] who could not follow his calling without his pipe in his mouth, but that text Isaiah 55, 2, coming into his mind hee layd aside his taking of tobacco. The other instance was of a profane person living nigh Haslingdon (who was but poor) and took up his time in the trade of smoking and also spent what should reliev his poor family. This man dreamed that he was taking tobacco, and that the devill stood by him filling one pipe upon another for him. In the morning hee fell to his old cours notwithstanding; thinking it was but a dream: but when hee came to take his pipe, hee had such an apprehension that the devill did indeed stand by him and doe the office as hee dreamed that hee was struck speechless for a time and when hee came to himself hee threw his tobacco in the fire and his pipes at the walls; resolving never to meddle more with it: soe much money as was formerly wasted by the week in to serving his family afterward weekly."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

In 1805 Lamb wrote to Wordsworth—"now I have bid farewell to my 'sweet enemy' tobacco ... I shall, perhaps, set nobly to work." Forthwith he set to work on the farce "Mr. H.," which some months later was produced at Drury Lane and was promptly damned. After its failure Lamb wrote to Hazlitt—"We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces." But Lamb and his pipe were not to be parted by even repeated resolutions to leave off smoking. It was years after this that he met Macready at Talfourd's, and by way probably of saying something to shock Macready; whose personality could hardly have been sympathetic to him, uttered the remarkable wish that the last breath he drew in might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.

It was in 1818 that Lamb published the collection of his writings, in two volumes, which contained the well-known "Farewell to Tobacco," written in 1805, and referred to in the letter of that year to Wordsworth quoted above. Its phrases of mingled abuse and affection are familiar to lovers of Lamb.

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