Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

In the neighbouring county of Somerset the Justices of the Peace sent presentments to the Council in 1632 of persons within the Hundred of Milverton and Kingsbury West thought fit to sell tobacco by retail; and for Wiveliscombe, Mr. Hancock says in his book on that old town, a mercer and a hosier were selected.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

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."

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