Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Undergraduates, like men of letters, did not pay much attention to the conventional attitude of society towards tobacco, and pipes maintained their popularity in college rooms. Thackeray, in the "Book of Snobs," describes youths at a University wine-party as "drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk punch—smoking—ghastly headache—frightful spectacle of dessert-table next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at least too highly coloured. In the recently published memoir of "J"—John Willis Clark—some reminiscences of the late Registrary are included; and "J" does not recognize Thackeray's picture as quite true of the "wines" of his undergraduate day, i.e. about 1850. "They may," he says, "have 'told bad stories and sung bad songs,' as Thackeray says in his 'Book of Snobs.' I can only say that I never heard either the one or the other." But certainly there was noise, and there was smoke—plenty of it. "Conversation there was none," says "J," "only a noise. Then came smoke. In a short time the atmosphere became dense, the dessert and the wine came to an end, and it was chapel time (mercifully)." One story Clark tells of an extraordinary attempt to smoke. Referring to the compulsory "chapels," he says that as a rule everybody behaved with propriety, whether they regarded the attendance as irksome or otherwise. But, he admits, "'Iniquity Corner,' as the space at the east end on each side of the altar was called, may occasionally have effectually sheltered card-playing; but when a young snob went so far as to light a cigar there, he had the pleasure of finishing it in the country, for he was rusticated. It was on a cognate occasion in Jesus College, in which cobblers' wax played a prominent part, that Dr. Corrie dismissed the culprit, after a severe lecture, with these admirable words: 'Your conduct, sir, is what a Christian would call profane, and a gentleman vulgar.'"

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Some sigh for this and that
My wishes don't go far;
The world may wag at will,
So I have my cigar.
- Thomas Hood.

The revival of smoking among those who were most amenable to the dictates of fashion, and among whom consequently tobacco had long been in bad odour, came by way of the cigar.

In the preceding chapters all the references to and illustrations of smoking have been concerned with pipes. Until the early years of the nineteenth century the use of cigars was practically unknown in this country. The earliest notices of cigars in English books occur in accounts of travel in Spain and Portugal, and in the Spanish Colonies, and in such notices the phonetic spelling of "segar" often occurs. A few folk still cling to this spelling—there was a "segar-shop" in the Strand till quite recently, and I saw the notice "segars" the other day over a small tobacco-shop in York—which has no authority, and on etymological grounds is indefensible. The derivation of "cigar" is not altogether clear; but the probabilities are strongly in favour of its connexion with "cigarra," the Spanish name for the cicada, the shrilly-chirping insect familiar in the southern countries of Europe, and the subject of frequent allusions by the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, as well as by modern scribes. A Spanish lexicographer of authority says that the cigar has the form of a "cicada" of paper, and, on the whole, it is highly probable that the likeness of the roll of tobacco-leaf to the cylindrical body of the insect (cigarra) was the reason that the "cigarro" was so called. There is no warrant of any kind for "segar."

From The earliest mention of cigars in English occurs in a book dated 1735. A traveller in Spanish America, named Cockburn, whose narrative was published in that year, describes how he met three friars at Nicaragua, who, he says, "gave us some Seegars to smoke ... these are Leaves of tobacco rolled up in such Manner that they serve both for a Pipe and Tobacco itself ... they know no other way here, for there is no such Thing as a Tobacco-Pipe throughout New Spain."

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