SOURCE: The Social History of Smoking, Martin Secker, 1914, 255 p.

In the excerpt below, Apperson assembles references to tobacco use from a wide variety of sources, including plays, pamphlets, and novels, to chronicle the varying degrees of acceptance of smoking as a social activity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Tobacco Triumphant: Smoking Fashionable and Universal

Tobacco engages Both sexes, all ages, The poor as well as the wealthy; From the court to the cottage, From childhood to dotage, Both those that are sick and the healthy. 

Wits' Recreations, 1640

This chapter and the next deal with the history of smoking during the first fifty years after its introduction as a social habit—roughly to 1630.

The use of tobacco spread with extraordinary rapidity among all classes of society. During the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign and through the early decades of the seventeenth century tobacco pipes were in...