Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

It has sometimes been said that Swift smoked; but this is a mistake. He had a fancy for taking tobacco in a slightly different way from the fashionable mode of taking snuff. He told Stella that he had left off snuff altogether, and then in the very next sentence remarked that he had "a noble roll of tobacco for grating, very good." And in a later letter to Stella, May 24, 1711, he asked if she still snuffed, and went on to say, in sentences that seem to contradict one another: "I have left it off, and when anybody offers me their box, I take about a tenth part of what I used to do, then just smell to it, and privately fling the rest away. I keep to my tobacco still, as you say; but even much less of that than formerly, only mornings and evenings, and very seldom in the day." One might infer from this that he smoked, but this Swift never did. His practice was to snuff up cut and dried tobacco, which was sometimes just coloured with Spanish snuff. This he did all his life, but as the mixture he took was not technically snuff, he never owned that he took snuff.

Another cleric of the period, well known to fame, who took snuff but also loved his pipe, was Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire, from 1697 to 1735. He not only smoked his pipe, but sang its praises:

In these raw mornings, when I'm freezing ripe,
What can compare with a tobacco-pipe?
Primed, cocked and toucht, 'twould better heat a man
Than ten Bath Faggots or Scotch warming-pan.

Samuel's greater son, John Wesley, did not share the parental love of a pipe. He spoke of the use of tobacco as "an uncleanly and unwholesome self-indulgence," and described snuffing as "a silly, nasty, dirty custom."

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

It has sometimes been supposed that the companion of Swift's Stella, Mrs. Rebecca Dingley, was addicted to smoking. In the letters which make up the famous "Journal to Stella," there are several references by Swift to the presents of tobacco which he was in the habit of sending to Mrs. Dingley. On September 21, 1710, he wrote: "I have the finest piece of Brazil tobacco for Dingley that ever was born." In the following month he again had a great piece of Brazil tobacco for the same lady, and again in November: "I have made Delaval promise to send me some Brazil tobacco from Portugal for you, Madam Dingley." In December, Swift was expressing his hope that Dingley's tobacco had not spoiled the chocolate which he had sent for Stella in the same parcel; and three months later he wrote: "No news of your box? I hope you have it, and are this minute drinking the chocolate, and that the smell of the Brazil tobacco has not affected it." The explanation of all this tobacco for Mistress Dingley is to be found in Swift's letter to Stella of October 23, 1711. "Then there's the miscellany," he writes, "an apron for Stella, a pound of chocolate, without sugar, for Stella, a fine snuff-rasp of ivory, given me by Mrs. St. John for Dingley, and a large roll of tobacco which she must hide or cut shorter out of modesty, and four pair of spectacles for the Lord knows who." The tobacco was clearly not for smoking, but for Dingley to operate upon with the snuff-rasp, and so supply herself with snuff-a luxury, which in those days, was as much enjoyed and as universally used by women as by men.

Read More