Chapter 6 Part 2
SMOKING UNDER KING WILLIAM III AND QUEEN ANNE
Return to Chapter 6 Part 1
Sir Roger de Coverley, as a typical country squire, was naturally a
smoker. He presented his friend the Spectator, the silent gentleman,
with a tobacco-stopper made by Will Wimble, telling him that Will had
been busy all the early part of the winter in turning great quantities
of them, and had made a present of one to every gentleman in the
county who had good principles and smoked. When Sir Roger was driving
in a hackney-coach he called upon the coachman to stop, and when the
man came to the window asked him if he smoked. While Sir Roger's
companion was wondering "what this would end in," the knight bid his
Jehu to "stop by the way at any good Tobacconist's, and take in a Roll
of their best Virginia." And when he visited Squire's near Gray's Inn
Gate, his first act was to call for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco,
a dish of coffee, a newspaper and a wax candle; and all the boys in
the coffee-room ran to serve him. The wax candle was of course a
convenience in matchless days for pipe-lighting. The "paper of
tobacco" was the equivalent of what is now vulgarly called a "screw"
of tobacco.
The practice of selling tobacco in small paper packets was common, and
moralists naturally had something to say about the fate of an author's
work, when the leaves of his books found their ultimate use as
wrappers for the weed. "For as no mortal author," says Addison, "in
the ordinary fate and vicissitude of things, knows to what use his
works may, some time or other, be applied, a man may often meet with
very celebrated names in a paper of tobacco. I have lighted my pipe
more than once with the writings of a prelate."
Addison and Steele smoked, and so did Prior, who seems to have had a
weakness at times for low company. After spending an evening with
Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope and Swift, it is recorded that he would go
"and smoke a pipe, and drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier
and his wife, in Long Acre, before he went to bed." Some of Prior's
poems, as Thackeray caustically remarks, smack not a little of the
conversation of his Long Acre friends. Pope for awhile attended the
symposium at Button's coffee-house, where Addison was the centre of
the coterie—he describes himself as sitting with them till two in the
morning over punch and Burgundy amid the fumes of tobacco—but such a
way of life did not suit his sickly constitution, and he soon
withdrew. It is not likely that he smoked.
The attractions and the atmosphere of provincial coffee-houses were
much the same as those of the London resorts. A German gentleman who
visited Cambridge in July and August 1710 remarked that in the Greeks'
coffee-house in that town, in the morning and after 3 o'clock in the
afternoon, you could meet the chief professors and doctors, who read
the papers over a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco. One of the
learned doctors took the German visitor to the weekly meeting of a
Music Club in one of the colleges. Here were assembled bachelors,
masters and doctors of music of the University—no professionals were
employed—who performed vocal and instrumental music to their mutual
gratification, though, apparently, not to the satisfaction of the
visitor, who records his opinion that the music was "very poor." "It
lasted," he says, "till 11 P.M., there was besides smoking
and drinking of wine, though we did not do much of either. At 11 the
reckoning was called for, and each person paid 2s."
There was clearly no prejudice against smoking at Cambridge. Abraham
de la Pryme notes in his diary for the year 1694 that when it was
rumoured in May of that year that a certain house opposite one of the
colleges was haunted, strange noises being heard in it, several
scholars of the college said, "Come, fetch us a good pitcher of ale,
and tobacco and pipes, and wee'l sit up and see this spirit." The ale
was duly provided, the pipes were lit, and the courageous smokers
spent the night in the house, sitting "singing and drinking there till
morning," but, alas! they neither saw nor heard anything.
Smoking was still popular also at Oxford. A. D'Anvers, in her
"Academia; or the Humours of Oxford," 1691, speaks, indeed, of
undergraduates who, when they could not get tobacco, did much as the
parson of Thornton is reputed to have done, as already related in
Chapter II, i.e. they condescended to smoke fragments of mats. With
this may be compared the macaronic lines:
At si
Mundungus desit: tum non funcare recusant
Brown-Paper tostâ, vel quod fit arundine bed-mat.
Tobacco, in Queen Anne's time, still maintained its hold over large
classes of the people, and was still dominant in most places of public
resort; but there were signs of change in various directions as we
have seen, and smoking had to a large extent ceased to be fashionable.
Pepys has very few allusions to tobacco; Evelyn fewer still. There is
little evidence as to whether or not the gallants of the Restoration
Court smoked; but considering the foppery of their attire and manners,
it seems almost certain that tobacco was not in favour among them. The
beaux with their full wigs—they carried combs of ivory or
tortoiseshell in their pockets with which they publicly combed their
flowing locks—their dandy canes and scented, laced handkerchiefs,
were not the men to enjoy the flavour of tobacco in a pipe. They were
still tobacco-worshippers; but they did not smoke. The Indian weed
retained its empire over the men (and women) of fashion by changing
its form. The beaux were the devotees of snuff. The deftly handled
pinch pleasantly titillated their nerves, and the dexterous use of the
snuff-box, moreover, could also serve the purposes of vanity by
displaying the beautiful whiteness of the hand, and the splendour of
the rings upon the fingers. The curled darlings of the late
seventeenth century and the "pretty fellows" of Queen Anne's time did
not forswear tobacco, but they abjured smoking. Snuff-taking was
universal in the fashionable world among both men and women; and the
development of this habit made smoking unfashionable. |
