of tobacco in these towns must be very great:  and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking.”  On the evening of the election at Eatanswill, Tupman and Snodgrass resort to the commercial room of the Peacock Inn, where “the atmosphere was redolent of tobacco-smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue to the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains which shaded the windows.”  Here, among others, were the dirty-faced man with a clay pipe, the very red-faced man behind a cigar, and the man with a black eye, who slowly filled a large Dutch pipe with most capacious bowl.  Tupman and Snodgrass were of the company and smoked cigars.  Sam Weller’s father smoked his pipe philosophically.  If Sam’s “mother-in-law” “flies in a passion, and breaks his pipe, he steps out and gets another.  Then she screams wery loud, and falls into ’sterics; and he smokes wery comfortably ’till she comes to agin.”  What better example could there be of pipe-engendered philosophy?  When Mr. Pickwick and Sam look in at old Weller’s house of call off Cheapside, they find the boxes full of stage coachmen, drinking and smoking, and among them is the old gentleman himself, “smoking with great vehemence.”  After having given his son valuable parental advice, “Mr. Weller, senior, refilled his pipe from a tin box he carried in his pocket, and, lighting his fresh pipe from the ashes of the old one, commenced smoking at a great rate.”

A little later when Mr. Pickwick hunts up Perker’s clerk Lowten, and joins the jovial circle at the Magpie and Stump, he finds on his right hand “a gentleman in a checked shirt and Mosaic studs, with a cigar in his mouth,” who expresses the hope that the newcomer does not “find this sort of thing disagreeable.”  “Not in the least,” replied Mr. Pickwick, “I like it very much, although I am no smoker myself.”  “I should be very sorry to say I wasn’t,” interposes another gentleman on the opposite side of the table.  “It’s board and lodging to me, is smoke.”  Mr. Pickwick glances at the speaker, and thinks that if it were washing too, it would be all the better!

Later again when the “couple o’ Sawbones,” the medical students, Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer, make their first appearance on the scene, they are discovered in the morning seated by Mr. Wardle’s kitchen fire, smoking cigars; and it is significant of how smoking out of doors was then regarded that Dickens, going on to describe Sawyer in detail, refers to “that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description.”  Apparently in 1836 the only person who would allow himself to be seen smoking in the street was of the kind naturally inclined to do the other objectionable things mentioned.  The same idea runs through