Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

It is a little curious, considering the devotion of latter-day men of letters to tobacco, that in their early days so many of the men who wrote on the subject attacked the social use of tobacco with violence and virulence. Perhaps, courtier-like, they followed the lead of the British Solomon, King James I. Their titles are characteristic of their style. A writer named Deacon published in 1616 a quarto entitled "Tobacco tortured in the filthy Fumes of tobacco refined"; but Joshua Sylvester had easily surpassed this when he wrote his "Tobacco Battered and the Pipes Shattered about their Eares, that idely Idolize so base and barbarous a Weed, or at least overlove so loathsome a Vanity, by a Volley of Holy Shot Thundered from Mount Helicon," 1615. Controversialists of that period rejoiced in full-worded titles and in full-blooded praise or abuse.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

A roll of tobacco, it may be noted, was a common form of payment to the Fleet parsons for their scoundrelly services. Pennant, writing in 1791, describes how these men hung out their frequent signs of a male and female hand conjoined, with the legend written below: "Marriages performed within." Before his shop walked the parson-"a squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid nightgown, with a fiery face, and ready to couple you for a dram of gin, or roll of tobacco."

Combinations of the roll in tobacconists' signs occur occasionally. In 1660 there was a "Tobacco Roll and Sugar Loaf" at Gray's Inn Gate, Holborn. In 1659 James Barnes issued a farthing token from the "Sugar Loaf and Three Tobacco Rolls" in the Poultry, London. The "Sugar Loaf" was the principal grocer's sign, and so when it is found in combination with the tobacco roll at this time it may reasonably be assumed that the proprietor of the business was a grocer who was also a tobacconist.

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