The Social History of Smoking

By George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13

A story is told of Sir Walter Raleigh by John Aubrey which seems to imply that at first women not only did not smoke, but that they disliked smoking by men. Aubrey says that Raleigh "standing in a stand at Sir R. Poyntz's parke at Acton, tooke a pipe of tobacco, which made the ladies quitt it till he had done." But this objection, whether general or not, soon vanished, for, as we have seen in a previous chapter, the gallant of Elizabethan and Jacobean days made a practice of smoking in his lady's presence. It seems certain, moreover, that some women, at least, smoked very soon after the introduction of tobacco; but it is not easy to find direct evidence, though there are sundry traditions and allusions which suggest that the practice was not unknown.

There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked—with unpleasant results. Campbell, in his "History of Virginia," says that Raleigh having offered her Majesty "some tobacco to smoke, after two or three whiffs she was seized with a nausea, upon observing which some of the Earl of Leicester's faction whispered that Sir Walter had certainly poisoned her. But her Majesty in a short while recovering made the countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe out among them." The Queen had no selfish desire to monopolize the novel sensations caused by smoking. An eighteenth-century writer, Oldys, in his "Life of Sir Walter Raleigh," declares that tobacco "soon became of such vogue in Queen Elizabeth's court, that some of the great ladies, as well as noblemen therein, would not scruple to take a pipe sometimes very sociably." But these stories rest on vague tradition, and probably have no foundation in fact.

King James I in his famous "Counter-blaste to Tobacco," hinted that the husband, by his indulgence in the habit, might "reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome, and cleane complexioned wife to that extremitie, that either shee must also corrupt her sweete breath therewith, or else resolve to live in a perpetuall stinking torment." His Majesty's style was forcible, if not elegant. There are also one or two references in the early dramatists. In Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," for instance, which was first acted in 1598, six years before King James blew his royal "Counter-blaste," Cob, the water-bearer, says that he would have any "man or woman that should but deal with a tobacco-pipe," immediately whipped. Prynne, in his attack on the stage, declared that women smoked pipes in theatres; but the truth of this statement may well be doubted. The habit was probably far from general among women, although Joshua Sylvester, a doughty opponent of the weed, was pleased to declare that "Fooles of all Sexes haunt it," i.e. tobacco.

The ballads of the period abound in rough woodcuts in which tavern scenes are often figured, wherein pewter pots and tobacco-pipes are shown lying on the table or in the hands or at the mouths of the male carousers. Men and women are figured together, but it would be very hard to find a woman in one of these rough cuts with a pipe in her hand or at her mouth. An example, in the "Shirburn Ballads" lies before me. The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called "A Knotte of Good Fellows," and beginning:

Come hither, mine host, come hither!
Come hither, mine host, come hither!
I pray thee, mine host,
Give us a pot and a tost,
And let us drinke all together.

The scene is a tavern interior. Around the table are four men and a woman, while a boy approaches carrying two huge measures of ale. One man is smoking furiously, while on the table lie three other pipes—one for each man—and sundry pots and glasses. The woman is plainly a convivial soul; but there is no pipe for her, and such provision was no doubt unusual.

T here is direct evidence, too, besides the story in the first paragraph of this chapter, that women disliked the prevalence of smoking. In Marston's "Antonio and Mellinda," 1602, Rosaline, when asked by her uncle when she will marry, makes the spirited reply—"Faith, kind uncle, when men abandon jealousy, forsake taking of tobacco, and cease to wear their beards so rudely long. Oh, to have a husband with a mouth continually smoking, with a bush of furs on the ridge of his chin, readie still to flop into his foaming chops, 'tis more than most intolerable;" and similar indications of dislike to smoking could be quoted from other plays.
On the other hand, it is certain that from comparatively early in the seventeenth century there were to be found here and there women who smoked.

On the title-page of Middleton's comedy, "The Roaring Girle," 1611, is a picture of the heroine, Moll Cutpurse, in man's apparel, smoking a pipe, from which a great cloud of smoke is issuing.

In the record of an early libel action brought in the court of the Archdeacon of Essex, some domestic scenes of 1621 are vividly represented. We need not trouble about the libel action, but two of the dramatis personæ were a certain George Thresher, who sold beer and tobacco at his "shopp in Romford," and a good friend and customer of his named Elizabeth Savage, who, sad to say, was described as much given to "stronge drincke and tobacco." In the course of the trial, on June 8, 1621, Mistress Savage had to tell her tale, part of which is reported as follows:

"George Thresher kept a shoppe in Romford and sold tobacco there. She came divers tymes to his shoppe to buy tobacco there; and sometimes, with company of her acquaintance, did take tobacco and drincke beere in the hall of George Thresher's house, sometimes with the said George, and sometimes with his father and his brothers. And sometimes shee hath had a joint of meat and a cople of chickens dressed there; and shee, and they, and some other of her freinds, have dined there together, and paid their share for their dinner, shee being many times more willing to dine there than at an inne or taverne."

Elizabeth was evidently of a sociable turn, and though she turned her nose up at a tavern, there seems to have been little difference between these festive dinners at Mr. Thresher's "shopp," where Mistress Savage indulged her taste for ale and tobacco, and similar pleasures at an inn or tavern.

Some of the references to women smokers occur in curious connexions. When one George Glapthorne, of Whittlesey, J.P., was returned to Parliament for the Isle of Ely in 1654, his return was petitioned against, and among other charges it was said that just before the election, in a certain Martin's ale-house, he had promised to give Mrs. Martin a roll of tobacco, and had also undertaken to grant her husband a licence to brew, thus unduly influencing and corrupting the electors.

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."

In some letters of the Appleton family, printed some time ago from the originals in the Bodleian Library, there is a curious letter, undated, but of 1652 or 1653, from Susan Crane, the widow of Sir Robert Crane, who was the second wife of Isaac Appleton of Buckman Vall, Norfolk. Writing to her husband, Isaac Appleton, at his chamber in Grayes Inn, as his "Afextinat wife," the good Susan, whose spelling is marvellous, tells her "Sweet Hart"—"I have done all the tobakcre you left mee; I pray send mee sum this weeke; and some angelleco ceedd and sum cerret sed." How much tobacco Mr. Appleton had provisioned his wife with cannot be known, but it looks as if she were a regular smoker and did not care to be long without a supply. In 1631 Edmond Howes, who edited Stow's "Chronicles," and continued them "onto the end of this present yeare 1631," wrote that tobacco was "at this day commonly used by most men and many women."

Anything like general smoking by women in the seventeenth century would appear to have been confined to certain parts of the country. Celia Fiennes, who travelled about England on horseback in the reign of William and Mary, tells us that at St. Austell in Cornwall ("St. Austins," she calls it) she disliked "the custome of the country which is a universal smoaking; both men, women, and children have all their pipes of tobacco in their mouths and soe sit round the fire smoaking, which was not delightful to me when I went down to talk with my Landlady for information of any matter and customes amongst them." What would King James have thought of these depraved Cornish folk? Other witnesses bear testimony to the prevalence of smoking among women in the west of England. Dunton, in that Athenian Oracle which was a kind of early forerunner of Notes and Queries, alluded to pipe-smoking by "the good Women and Children in the West." Misson, the French traveller, who was here in 1698, after remarking that "Tabacco" is very much used in England, says that "the very Women take it in abundance, particularly in the Western Counties. But why the very Women? What Occasion is there for that very? We wonder that in certain Places it should be common for Women to take Tabacco; and why should we wonder at it? The Women of Devonshire and Cornwall wonder that the Women of Middlesex do not take Tabacco: And why should they wonder at it? In truth, our Wonderments are very pleasant Things!" And with that sage and satisfactory conclusion to his catechism we may leave M. Misson, though he goes on to philosophize about the effect of smoking by the English clergy upon their theology!

Another French visitor to our shores, M. Jorevin, whose rare book of travels was published at Paris in 1672, was wandering in the west of England about the year 1666, and in the course of his journey stayed at the Stag Inn at Worcester, where he found he had to make himself quite at home with the family of his hostess. He tells us that according to the custom of the country the landladies sup with strangers and passengers, and if they have daughters, these also are of the company to entertain the guests at table with pleasant conceits where they drink as much as the men. But what quite disgusted our visitor was "that when one drinks the health of any person in company, the custom of the country does not permit you to drink more than half the cup, which is filled up and presented to him or her whose health you have drunk. Moreover, the supper being finished, they set on the table half a dozen pipes, and a packet of tobacco, for smoking, which is a general custom as well among women as men, who think that without tobacco one cannot live in England, because, say they, it dissipates the evil humours of the brain."

Although, according to M. Misson, the women of Devon and Cornwall might wonder why the women of Middlesex did not take tobacco, it is certain that London and its neighbourhood did contain at least a few female smokers. Tom Brown, often dubbed "the facetious," but to whom a sterner epithet might well be applied, writing about the end of the seventeenth century, mentions a vintner's wife who, having "made her pile," as might be said nowadays, retires to a little country-house at Hampstead, where she drinks sack too plentifully, smokes tobacco in an elbow-chair, and snores away the remainder of her life. And the same writer was responsible for a satirical letter "to an Old Lady that smoak'd Tobacco," which shows that the practice was not general, for the letter begins: "Madam, Tho' the ill-natur'd world censures you for smoaking." Brown advised her to continue the "innocent diversion" because, first, it was good for the toothache, "the constant persecutor of old ladies," and, secondly, it was a great help to meditation, "which is the reason, I suppose," he continues, "that recommends it to your parsons; the generality of whom can no more write a sermon without a pipe in their mouths, than a concordance in their hands."

From the evidence so far adduced it may fairly be concluded, I think, that during the seventeenth century smoking was not fashionable, or indeed anything but rare, among the women of the more well-to-do classes, while among women of humbler rank it was an occasional, and in a few districts a fairly general habit.

The same conclusion holds good for the eighteenth century. Among women of the lowest class smoking was probably common enough. In Fielding's "Amelia," a woman of the lowest character is spoken of as "smoking tobacco, drinking punch, talking obscenely and swearing and cursing"—which accomplishments are all carefully noted, because none of them would be applicable to the ordinary respectable female.

The fine lady disliked tobacco. The author of "A Pipe of tobacco," in Dodsley's well-known "Collection," to which reference has already been made, wrote:

Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon;
They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.
        *     *     *     *     *     *     *
Citronia vows it has an odious stink;
She will not smoke (ye gods!)—but she will drink;

and the same writer describes tobacco as "By ladies hated, hated by the beaux." Although the fine lady may have affected to swoon at the sight of pipes, and belles generally, like the beaux, may have disdained tobacco as vulgar, yet there were doubtless still to be found here and there respectable women who occasionally indulged in a smoke. In an early Spectator, Addison gives the rules of a "Twopenny Club, erected in this Place, for the Preservation of Friendship and good Neighbourhood," which met in a little ale-house and was frequented by artisans and mechanics. Rule II was, "Every member shall fill his pipe out of his own box"; and Rule VII was, "If any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or smokes."

In one of the valuable volumes issued by the Georgian Society of Dublin a year or two ago, Dr. Mahaffy, writing on the mid-eighteenth century society of the Irish capital, quotes an advertisement by a Dublin tobacconist of "mild pigtail for ladies" which suggests the alarming question—Did Irish ladies chew?

It has sometimes been supposed that the companion of Swift's Stella, Mrs. Rebecca Dingley, was addicted to smoking. In the letters which make up the famous "Journal to Stella," there are several references by Swift to the presents of tobacco which he was in the habit of sending to Mrs. Dingley. On September 21, 1710, he wrote: "I have the finest piece of Brazil tobacco for Dingley that ever was born." In the following month he again had a great piece of Brazil tobacco for the same lady, and again in November: "I have made Delaval promise to send me some Brazil tobacco from Portugal for you, Madam Dingley." In December, Swift was expressing his hope that Dingley's tobacco had not spoiled the chocolate which he had sent for Stella in the same parcel; and three months later he wrote: "No news of your box? I hope you have it, and are this minute drinking the chocolate, and that the smell of the Brazil tobacco has not affected it." The explanation of all this tobacco for Mistress Dingley is to be found in Swift's letter to Stella of October 23, 1711. "Then there's the miscellany," he writes, "an apron for Stella, a pound of chocolate, without sugar, for Stella, a fine snuff-rasp of ivory, given me by Mrs. St. John for Dingley, and a large roll of tobacco which she must hide or cut shorter out of modesty, and four pair of spectacles for the Lord knows who." The tobacco was clearly not for smoking, but for Dingley to operate upon with the snuff-rasp, and so supply herself with snuff—a luxury, which in those days, was as much enjoyed and as universally used by women as by men.

Even Quakeresses sometimes smoked. A list of the sea-stores put on board the ship in which certain friends—Samuel Fothergill, Mary Peisly, Katherine Payton and others—sailed from Philadelphia for England in June 1756, is still extant. In those days Atlantic passages were long, and might last for an indefinite period, and passengers provisioned themselves accordingly. On this occasion the passage though stormy was very quick, for it lasted only thirty-four days. The list of provisions taken is truly formidable. It includes all sorts of eatables and drinkables in astonishing quantities. The "Women's Chest," we are told, contained, among a host of other good and useful things, "Balm, sage, summer Savoury, horehound, Tobacco, and Oranges; two bottles of Brandy, two bottles of Jamaica Spirrit, A Canister of green tea, a Jar of Almond paste, Ginger bread." Samuel Fothergill's "new chest" contained tobacco among many other things; and a box of pipes was among the miscellaneous stores.

The history of smoking by women through Victorian days need not detain us long. There have always been pipe-smokers among the women of the poorer classes. Up to the middle of the last century smoking was very common among the hard-working women of Northumberland and the Scottish border. Nor has the practice by any means yet died out. In May 1913, a woman, who was charged with drunkenness at the West Ham police court, laid the blame for her condition on her pipe. She said she had smoked it for twenty years, and "it always makes me giddy!" The writer, in August 1913, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.

It is not so very long ago that an English traveller heard a working-man courteously ask a Scottish fish-wife, who had entered a smoking-compartment of the train, whether she objected to smoking. The good woman slowly produced a well-seasoned "cutty" pipe, and as she began to cut up a "fill" from a rank-smelling tobacco, replied: "Na, na, laddie, I've come in here for a smoke ma'sel."

The Darlington and Stockton Times in 1856 recorded the death on December 10, at Wallbury, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the 110th year of her age, of Jane Garbutt, widow. Mrs. Garbutt had been twice married, her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic wars. The old woman, said the journal, "had dwindled into a small compass, but she was free from pain, retaining all her faculties to the last, and enjoying her pipe. About a year ago the writer of this notice paid her a visit, and took her, as a 'brother-piper,' a present of tobacco, which ingredient of bliss was always acceptable from her visitors. Asking of her the question how long she had smoked, her reply was 'Vary nigh a hundred years'!" In 1845 there died at Buxton, at the age of ninety-six, a woman named Pheasy Molly, who had been for many years an inveterate smoker. Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire. She had burned herself more than once before in performing the same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her end.

The old Irishwomen who were once a familiar feature of London street-life as sellers of apples and other small wares at street corners, were often hardened smokers; and so were, and doubtless still are, many of the gipsy women who tramp the country. An old Seven Dials ballad has the following choice stanza—

When first I saw Miss Bailey,
'Twas on a Saturday,
At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,
And smoking a yard of clay.

Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign female smoking in the nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned. Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be whispered that here and there a lady—who was usually considered dreadfully "fast" for her pains—was accustomed to venture upon a cigarette.

In "Puck," 1870, Ouida represented one of her beautiful young men, Vy Bruce, as "murmuring idlest nonsense to Lilian Lee, as he lighted one of his cigarettes for her use"—but Lilian Lee was a cocotte.

An amusing incident is related in Forster's "Life of Dickens," which shows how entirely unknown was smoking among women of the middle and upper classes in England some ten years after Queen Victoria came to the throne. Dickens was at Lausanne and Geneva in the autumn of 1846. At his hotel in Geneva he met a remarkable mother and daughter, both English, who admired him greatly, and whom he had previously known at Genoa. The younger lady's conversation would have shocked the prim maids and matrons of that day. She asked Dickens if he had ever "read such infernal trash" as Mrs. Gore's; and exclaimed "Oh God! what a sermon we had here, last Sunday." Dickens and his two daughters—"who were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards"—dined by invitation with the mother and daughter. The daughter asked him if he smoked. "Yes," said Dickens, "I generally take a cigar after dinner when I'm alone." Thereupon said the young lady, "I'll give you a good 'un when we go upstairs." But the sequel must be told in the novelist's own inimitable style. "Well, sir," he wrote, "in due course we went upstairs, and there we were joined by an American lady residing in the same hotel ... also a daughter ... American lady married at sixteen; American daughter sixteen now, often mistaken for sisters, &c. &c. &c. When that was over, the younger of our entertainers brought out a cigar-box, and gave me a cigar, made of negrohead she said, which would quell an elephant in six whiffs. The box was full of cigarettes—good large ones, made of pretty strong tobacco; I always smoke them here, and used to smoke them at Genoa, and I knew them well. When I lighted my cigar, daughter lighted hers, at mine; leaned against the mantelpiece, in conversation with me; put out her stomach, folded her arms, and with her pretty face cocked up sideways and her cigarette smoking away like a Manchester cotton mill, laughed, and talked, and smoked, in the most gentlemanly manner I ever beheld. Mother immediately lighted her cigar; American lady immediately lighted hers; and in five minutes the room was a cloud of smoke, with us four in the centre pulling away bravely, while American lady related stories of her 'Hookah' upstairs, and described different kinds of pipes. But even this was not all. For presently two Frenchmen came in, with whom, and the American lady, daughter sat down to whist. The Frenchmen smoked of course (they were really modest gentlemen and seemed dismayed), and daughter played for the next hour or two with a cigar continually in her mouth—never out of it. She certainly smoked six or eight. Mother gave in soon—I think she only did it out of vanity. American lady had been smoking all the morning. I took no more; and daughter and the Frenchmen had it all to themselves. Conceive this in a great hotel, with not only their own servants, but half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and out! I showed no atom of surprise, but I never was so surprised, so ridiculously taken aback, in my life; for in all my experience of 'ladies' of one kind and another, I never saw a woman—not a basket woman or a gipsy—smoke before!" This last remark is highly significant. Forster says that Dickens "lived to have larger and wider experience, but there was enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described." The words "cigar" and "cigarette" are used indifferently by the novelist, but it seems clear from the description and from the number smoked by the lady in an hour or two, that it was a cigarette and not a cigar, properly so called, which was never out of her mouth.

The ladies who so surprised Dickens were English and American, but at the period in question—the early 'forties of the last century—one of the freaks of fashion at Paris was the giving of luncheon parties for ladies only, at which cigars were handed round.

The first hints of feminine smoking in England may be traced, like so many other changes in fashion, in the pages of Punch. In 1851, steady-going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived outburst of "bloomerism," imported from the United States. Of course it was at once suggested that women who would go so far as to imitate masculine attire and to emancipate themselves from the usual conventions of feminine dress, would naturally seek to imitate men in other ways also. Leech had a picture of "A Quiet Smoke" in Punch, which depicted five ladies in short wide skirts and "bloomers" in a tobacconist's shop, two smoking cigars and one a pipe, while "one of the inferior animals" behind the counter was selling tobacco. But this was satire and hardly had much relation to fact.

It was not until the 'sixties of the last century that cigarette-smoking by women began to creep in. Mortimer Collins, writing in 1869, in a curious outburst against the use of tobacco by young men, said, "When one hears of sly cigarettes between feminine lips at croquet parties, there is no more to be said." Since that date cigarette-smoking has become increasingly popular among women, and the term "sly" has long ceased to be applicable. "Punch's Pocket-Book" for 1878 had an amusing skit on a ladies' reading-party, to which Mr. Punch acted as "coach." After breakfast the reading ladies lounged on the lawn with cigarettes.

What Queen Victoria, who hated tobacco and banished it from her presence and from her abodes as far as she could, would have thought and said of the extent to which cigarette-smoking is indulged in now by women, is a question quite unanswerable. Yet Queen Victoria once received a present of pipes and tobacco. By the hands of Sir Richard Burton the Queen had sent a damask tent, a silver pipe, and two silver trays to the King of Dahomey. That potentate told Sir Richard that the tent was very handsome, but too small; that the silver pipe did not smoke so well as his old red clay with a wooden stem; and that though he liked the trays very much, he thought them hardly large enough to serve as shields. He hoped that the next gifts would include a carriage and pair, and a white woman, both of which he would appreciate very much. However, he sent gifts in return to her Britannic Majesty, and among them were a West African state umbrella, a selection of highly coloured clothing materials, and some native pipes and tobacco for the Queen to smoke.

Many royal ladies of Europe, contemporaries of Queen Victoria and her son, have had the reputation of being confirmed smokers. Among them may be named Carmen Sylva, the poetess—Queen of Roumania, the Dowager Tsaritsa of Russia, the late Empress of Austria, King Alfonso's mother, formerly Queen-Regent of Spain, the Dowager Queen Margherita of Italy and ex-Queen Amélie of Portugal. It is, of course, well known that Austrian and Russian ladies generally are fond of cigarette-smoking. On Russian railways it is not unusual to find a compartment labelled "For ladies who do not smoke."

The newspapers reported not long ago from the other side of the Atlantic that the "smart" women of Chicago had substituted cigars for cigarettes. According to an interview with a Chicago hotel proprietor, the fair smokers "select their cigars as men do, either black and strong, or light, according to taste." How in the world else could they select them? It is not likely, however, that cigar-smoking will become popular among women. For one thing, it leaves too strong and too clinging an odour on the clothes.

One of the latest announcements, however, in the fashion pages of the newspapers is the advent of "smoking Jackets" for ladies! We are informed in the usual style of such pages, that "the well-dressed woman has begun to consider the little smoking-jacket indispensable." This jacket, we are told "is a very different matter to the braided velvet coats which were donned by our masculine forbears in the days of long drooping cavalry moustaches, tightly buttoned frock-coats, and flexible canes. The feminine smoking-jacket of to-day is worn with entrancing little evening or semi-evening frocks, and represents a compromise between a cloak and a coat, being exquisitely draped and fashioned of the softest and most attractive of the season's beautiful fabrics."

There are still many good people nowadays who are shocked at the idea of women smoking; and to them may be commended the common-sense words of Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, formerly of Ripon, who arrived in New York early in 1913 to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard University. The American newspapers reported him as saying, with reference to this subject: "Many women in England who are well thought of, smoke. I do not attempt to enter into the ethical part of this matter, but this much I say: if men find it such a pleasure to smoke, why shouldn't women? There are many colours in the rainbow; so there are many tastes in people. What may be a pleasure to men may be given to women. When we find women smoking, as they do in some branches of society to-day, the mere pleasure of that habit must be accepted as belonging to both sexes."

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