Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

The belief in the prophylactic power of tobacco was, however, very generally held. When Mr. Samuel Pepys on June 7, 1665, for the first time saw several houses marked with the ominous red cross, and the words "Lord, have mercy upon us" chalked upon the doors, he felt so ill at ease that he was obliged to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew. There is nothing to show that Pepys even smoked, which considering his proficiency in the arts of good-fellowship, is perhaps a little surprising. Defoe, in his fictitious but graphic "Journal of the Plague Year in London," says that the sexton of one of the London parishes, who personally handled a large number of the victims, never had the distemper at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and was sexton of the parish to the time of his death. This man, according to Defoe, "never used any preservative against the infection other than holding garlic and rue in his mouth, and smoking tobacco."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

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.

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