Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

In remote English and Welsh parishes men seem occasionally to have smoked in churches without any intention of being irreverent, and without any consciousness that they were doing anything unusual. Canon Atkinson, in his delightful book "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish," tells how, when he first went to Danby in Cleveland—then very remote from the great world—and had to take his first funeral, he found inside the church the parish clerk, who was also parish schoolmaster by the way, sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window with his hat on and comfortably smoking his pipe. A correspondent of the Times in 1895 mentioned that his mother had told him how she remembered seeing smoking in a Welsh church about 1850—"The Communion table stood in the aisle, and the farmers were in the habit of putting their hats upon it, and when the sermon began they lit their pipes and smoked, but without any idea of irreverence." In an Essex church about 1861, a visitor had pointed out to him various nooks in the gallery where short pipes were stowed away, which he was informed the old men smoked during service; and several of the pews in the body of the church contained triangular wooden spittoons filled with sawdust.

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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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