Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

This print is now chiefly of interest because the plate was adorned with a tiny etching by Hogarth, in which appear the figures of the British Lion and Britannia, both with pipes in their mouths, Britannia being seated on a cask of tobacco.

Hogarth was fond of introducing the pipe into his plates. In the tail-piece to his works, which he prepared a few months before his death, and which he called The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings, the end of everything is represented. Time himself, supported against a broken column, is expiring, his scythe falling from his grasp and a long clay pipe breaking in two as it falls from his lips. This was issued in 1764—Hogarth's last published work. In the plate which shows the execution of Thomas Idle, in the "Industry and Idleness" series, Hogarth depicts the little hangman smoking a short pipe as he sits on the top of the gallows, waiting for his victim. The familiar plate of A Modern Midnight Conversation shows a parson in surplice and wig smoking like a furnace while he ladles punch from a bowl—probably meant for a portrait of the notorious Orator Henley. Most of the other guests are also shown smoking long clay pipes.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

There are still many good people nowadays who are shocked at the idea of women smoking; and to them may be commended the common-sense words of Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, formerly of Ripon, who arrived in New York early in 1913 to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard University. The American newspapers reported him as saying, with reference to this subject: "Many women in England who are well thought of, smoke. I do not attempt to enter into the ethical part of this matter, but this much I say: if men find it such a pleasure to smoke, why shouldn't women? There are many colours in the rainbow; so there are many tastes in people. What may be a pleasure to men may be given to women. When we find women smoking, as they do in some branches of society today, the mere pleasure of that habit must be accepted as belonging to both sexes."

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