Chapter 11 Part 1
LATER VICTORIAN DAYS
When life was all a summer day,
And I was under twenty,
Three loves were scattered in my way—
And three at once are plenty.
Three hearts, if offered with a grace,
One thinks not of refusing.
The task in this especial case
Was only that of choosing.
I knew not which to make my pet—
My pipe, cigar, or cigarette.
Henry S. Leigh.
The social history of smoking in later Victorian days is marked by the
triumph of the cigarette. The introduction of the cigar, as we have
seen, brought about the revival of smoking, from the point of view of
fashion, in the early decades of the nineteenth century; and the
coming of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun.
The earliest references for the word "cigarette" in the Oxford
Dictionary are dated 1842 and 1843, but both refer to the smoking of
cigarettes abroad—in France and Italy. The 1843 quotation is from a
book by Mrs. Romer, in which she says—"The beggars in the streets
have paper cigars (called cigarettes) in their mouths." The wording
here would seem to show that cigarettes were not then familiar to
English people.
Laurence Oliphant, who was both a man of letters and a man of fashion,
is generally credited with the introduction into English society of
the cigarette; but it is difficult to suggest even an approximate
date. Writing from Boulogne to W.H. Wills in September 1854, Dickens
says, "I have nearly exhausted the cigarettes I brought here," and
proceeds to give directions for some to be sent to him from London.
This is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette-smoking in
England; but it is possible that by "cigarettes" Dickens meant not
what we now know as such, but simply small cigars . Mr. H.M. Hyndman,
in his "Record of an Adventurous Life," says that when he was living
as a pupil, about the year 1860, with the Rector of Oxburgh, his
fellow-pupils included "Edward Abbott of Salonica, who, poor fellow,
was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings
at the beginning of the Turco-Servian War. Cigarette-smoking, now so
popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the
finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself,
was the first devotee of this habit I encountered."
Fairholt, in his book on "Tobacco," which was published in 1859,
mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central
America, but makes no reference to their use in this country.
The late Lady Dorothy Nevill said that although cigarettes are a
modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly
different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "when old
Peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece
of paper. They called this a papelito, and I fancy it was much the
same thing as a cigarette." But if this were so, the habit must have
died out long before the cigarette, as we now know it, came into
vogue.
It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there
may have been an occasional cigarette-smoker in England, like the
Edward Abbott of Mr. Hyndman's reminiscences, yet it was not until a
little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls of tobacco
became at all common among Englishmen; and it is quite likely that the
credit (or discredit, as the reader pleases) of bringing them into
general, and especially into fashionable, use, has been rightly given
to Laurence Oliphant.
Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870. In "Puck," which was
published in that year, Ouida—who is hardly an unimpeachable
authority on the ways and customs of fashionable folk, though she
loved to paint fancy pictures of their sayings and doings—pictures
the Row: "the most fashionable lounge you have, but it is a Republic
for all that." There, she says, "could Bill Jacobs lean against a
rail, with a clay-pipe in his mouth, and a terrier under his arm,
close beside the Earl of Guilliadene, with his cigarette and his
eye-glass, and his Poole-cut habiliments."
Thirty years or more ago the late Andrew Lang wrote an article
entitled "Enchanted Cigarettes," which began—"To dream our literary
projects, Balzac says, is like 'smoking enchanted cigarettes,' but
when we try to tackle our projects, to make them real, the enchantment
disappears—we have to till the soil, to sow the weed, to gather the
leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manufactured, while there may
be no market for them after all. Probably most people have enjoyed
the fragrance of these cigarettes and have brooded over much which
they will never put on paper. Here are some of 'the ashes of the weeds
of my delight'—memories of romances whereof no single line is
written, or is likely to be written." What Balzac said in his "La
Cousine Bette" was—"Penser, rêver, concevoir de belles œuvres est
une occupation délicieuse. C'est fumer des cigares enchantés, c'est
mener la vie de la courtisane occupée à sa fantaisie." Balzac's cigars
became cigarettes in Lang's fantasy. The French novelist seems to have
been one of those who praised tobacco without using it much himself.
In his "Illusions Perdues" Carlos Herrera, who was Vautrin, says to
Lucien, whom he meets on the point of suicide: "Dieu nous a donné le
tabac pour endormir nos passions et nos douleurs." M.A. Le Breton,
however, in his book on Balzac—"L'Homme et L'Œuvre"—says: "Il ne se
soutient qu'à force de café," though he would sit working at his desk
for twenty-five hours running.
About the time that Lang's article was written, Sir F.C. Burnand's
burlesque, "Bluebeard" was produced at the Gaiety Theatre. In those
days a certain type of young man, since known by many names, including
the present day "nut," was called a "masher"; and Burnand's burlesque
included a duet with the refrain:
We are mashers, we are,
As we smoke our cigar
And crawl along, never too quick;
We are mashers, you bet,
With the light cigarette
And the quite irreproachable stick. Nowadays the cigarette is in such universal use, that it would be
impossible thus to associate it with any particular type of man, sane
or inane. |
