Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

The satirist wrote truly that after all the fashionable abstainers had been deducted, crowds remained, who smoked as heartily as their predecessors of a century earlier. The populace was still on the side of tobacco. This was well shown in 1732 when Sir Robert Walpole proposed special excise duties on tobacco, and brought a Bill into Parliament which would have given his excisemen powers of inquisition which were much resented by the people generally. The controversy produced a host of squibs and caricatures, most of which were directed against the measure. The Bill was defeated in 1733, and great and general were the rejoicings. When the news reached Derby on April 19 in that year, the dealers in tobacco caused all the bells in the Derby churches to be rung, and we may be sure that this rather unusual performance was highly popular. The withdrawal of the odious duty was further celebrated by caricatures and "poetical" chants of triumph. One of the leading opponents of the Bill had been a well-known puffing tobacconist named Bradley, who was accustomed to describe his wares as "the best in Christendom"; and when the Bill was defeated Bradley's portrait was published for popular circulation, above these lines:

Behold the man, who, when a gloomy band
Of vile excisemen threatened all the land,
Help'd to deliver from their harpy gripe
The cheerful bottle and the social pipe.
O rare Ben Bradley! may for this the bowl,
Still unexcised, rejoice thy honest soul!
May still the best in Christendom for this
Cleave to thy stopper, and compleat thy bliss!

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

Women smokers were not confined to any one class of society. The Rev. Giles Moore, Rector of Horsted Keynes, Sussex, made a note in his journal and account book in 1665 of "Tobacco for my wyfe, 3d." As from other entries in Mr. Moore's account book we know that two ounces cost him one shilling, we may wonder what Mrs. Moore was going to do with her half-ounce. There is no other reference to tobacco for her in the journal and account book. Possibly she was not a smoker at all, but needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose. There is ample evidence to show that in the seventeenth century extraordinary medicinal virtues continued to be attributed to the "divine weed."

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