Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

The professor, after luncheon, was pressed by the squire—"who, on any other occasion would never waste time in smoking, and only filled his short clay pipe at the end of his day's work"—to come to his smoking-room. As regards this room the professor drily remarked—"I thought I had noticed that even the key-hole was stopped up, in order to preserve the ladies' delicate nerves from every disagreeable sensation." After dinner, again, when the ladies had left the table, "the gentlemen passed the bottles of port, sherry, and claret, with the regularity of planets from hand to hand," but no one dreamed of smoking. That was reserved for the secluded apartment after the ladies had gone to bed. Neither host nor guest imagined what a revolution another generation or so would make in these social habits.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

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.

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