Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

Parr was not a model smoker. He was brutally overbearing towards other folk, and would accept no invitation except on the understanding that he might smoke when and where he liked. It was his invariable practice, wherever he might be visiting, to smoke a pipe as soon as he had got out of bed. His biographer says—"The ladies were obliged to bear his tobacco, or to give up his company; and at Hatton (1786-1825) now and then he was the tyrant of the fireside." Parr was capable of smoking twenty pipes in an evening, and described himself as "rolling volcanic fumes of tobacco to the ceiling" while he worked at his desk. At a dinner which was given at Trinity College, Cambridge, to the Duke of Gloucester, as Chancellor of the University, when the cloth was removed, Parr at once started his pipe and began, says one who was present, "blowing a cloud into the faces of his neighbours, much to their annoyance, and causing royalty to sneeze by the stimulating stench of mundungus." It is surprising that people were willing to put up with such bad manners as Parr was accustomed to exhibit; but his reputation was then great, and he traded upon it.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

At the Quarterly Meeting of Aberdeen Friends in 1692 a "weighty paper containing several heads of solid advyces and Counsells to friends" sent by Irish Quakers, was read. These counsels abound with amusingly prim suggestions. Among them is the warning to "take heed of being overcome with strong drink or tobacco, which many by custome are brought into bondag to the creature." The Aberdeen Friends themselves a little later were greatly concerned at the increasing indulgence in "superfluous apparell and in vain recreations among the young ones"; and in 1698 they issued a paper dealing in great detail with matters of dress and deportment. Among a hundred other things treated with minutest particularity, the desire is expressed that "all Idle and needless Smoaking of tobacco be forborn."

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