the allusions to tobacco in “Pickwick.”  Smoking was undeniably vulgar.  Mr. John Smauker, who introduces Sam Weller at the “friendly swarry” of the Bath footmen, smokes a cigar “through an amber tube”—­cigar-holders were a novelty.  When Mr. Pickwick is taken to the house of Namby, the sheriffs’ officer, the “principal features” of the front parlour are “fresh sand and stale tobacco smoke.”  One of the occupants of the room is a “mere boy of nineteen or twenty, who, though it was yet barely ten o’clock, was drinking gin and water, and smoking a cigar, amusements to which, judging from his inflamed countenance, he had devoted himself pretty constantly for the last year or two of his life.”  Tobacco-smoke pervades the Fleet prison.  In fact, to trace tobacco through the pages of “Pickwick” is to realize vividly how vulgar if not vicious an accomplishment smoking was considered by the fashionable world and how popular it was among the nobodies of the unfashionable world.

Similar morals may be drawn from other works of fiction.  The action of the first chapters of Thackeray’s “Pendennis” passes early in the nineteenth century.  In the third chapter Foker has a cigar in his mouth as he strolls with Pen down the High Street of Chatteris.  Old Doctor Portman meets them and regards “with wonder Pen’s friend, from whose mouth and cigar clouds of fragrance issued, which curled round the doctor’s honest face and shovel hat.  ’An old school-fellow of mine, Mr. Foker,’ said Pen.  The doctor said ‘H’m!’ and scowled at the cigar.  He did not mind a pipe in his study, but the cigar was an abomination to the worthy gentleman.”  The reverend gentleman in liking his pipe was faithful to the traditional fondness for smoking of parsons; but smoking must be in the study.  To smoke in the street was vulgar; and to smoke the newfangled cigar was worse.

Pendennis, when he comes home the first time from Oxbridge, brings with him a large box of cigars of strange brand, which he smokes “not only about the stables and greenhouses, where they were good” for his mother’s plants, and which were obviously places to which a man who wished to smoke should betake himself, but in his own study, which rather shocks his mother.  Pen goes from bad to worse during his University days, and, sad to say, one Sunday in the last long vacation, the “wretched boy,” instead of going to church, “was seen at the gate of the Clavering Arms smoking a cigar, in the face of the congregation as it issued from St. Mary’s.  There was an awful sensation in the village society.  Portman prophesied Pen’s ruin after that, and groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal.”  Later the smoke from Warrington’s short pipe and Pen’s cigars floats through many pages of the novel.

X

EARLY VICTORIAN DAYS

    Scent to match thy rich perfume
    Chemic art did ne’er presume
    Through her quaint alembic strain,
    None so sovereign to the brain.