Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 4: On weekdays many New England Puritans probably smoked as their friends in old England did. A contemporary painting of a group of Puritan divines over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of Newbury, shows them well provided with punch-bowl and drinking-cups, tobacco and pipes. One parson, the Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of Charlestown, was very unconventional in his attire. He seldom wore a coat, "but generally appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth." John Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the Indians, warmly denounced both the wearing of wigs and the smoking of tobacco. But his denunciations were ineffectual in both matters—heads continued to be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and pipe-smoke continued to ascend.
From Chapter 8: There is ample evidence, apart from Johnson's dictum, that in the latter part of the eighteenth century smoking had "gone out." In Mrs. Climenson's "Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Lybbe Powys," we hear of a bundle of papers at Hardwick House, near Whitchurch, Oxon, which bears the unvarnished title "Dick's Debts." This Dick was a Captain Richard Powys who had a commission in the Guards, and died at the early age of twenty-six in the year 1768. This list of debts, it appears, gives "the most complete catalogue of the expenses of a dandy of the Court of George II, consisting chiefly of swords, buckles, lace, Valenciennes and point d'Espagne, gold and amber-headed canes, tavern bills and chair hire." But in all the ample detail of Captain Powys's list of extravagances there is nothing directly or indirectly relating to smoking. The beaux of the time did not smoke.
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