Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

No doubt smoking had its ups and downs at the Universities apart from the set of the main current of fashion. We learn from the invaluable Gunning that at Cambridge about 1786 smoking was going "out of fashion among the junior members of our combination-rooms, except on the river in the evening, when every man put a short pipe in his mouth." "I took great pains," he adds, "to make myself master of this elegant accomplishment, but I never succeeded, though I used to renew the attempt with a perseverance worthy of a better cause." About the same time Dr. Farmer was Master of Emmanuel and the Master was an inveterate smoker. Gunning says that Emmanuel parlour under Farmer's presidency was always open to those who loved pipes and tobacco and cheerful conversation—a very natural collocation of tastes. Farmer's silver tobacco-pipe is still preserved in his old college, while Porson's japanned snuff-box is at Trinity.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

But although many pipes were smoked at the Universities, there were occasionally to be found odd survivals of old prejudices. Dr. Shipley, in his recent memoir of John Willis Clark, the Cambridge Registrary, says that even in the 'seventies of the last century there was an elderly Don at Cambridge who once rebuked a Junior Fellow, who was smoking a pipe in the Wilderness, with the remark, "No Christian gentleman smokes a pipe, or if he does he smokes a cigar." The perpetrator of this bull was the same parson who married late in life, and returning to his church after a honeymoon of six weeks, publicly thanked God "for three weeks of unalloyed connubial bliss."

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