Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

Sometimes tobacco was used in church for disinfecting or deodorizing purposes. The churchwardens' accounts of St. Peter's, Barnstaple, for 1741 contain the entry: "Pd. for Tobacco and Frankincense burnt in the Church 2s. 6d." Sprigs of juniper, pitch, and "sweete wood," in combination with incense, were often used for the same purpose.

smoking, it may safely be asserted, was never practised commonly in English churches. Even in our own day people have been observed smoking—not during service time, but in passing through the building—in church in some of the South American States, and nearer home in Holland; but in England such desecration has been occasional only, and quite exceptional.

One need not be much surprised at any instance of lack of reverence in English churches during the eighteenth century, and a few instances can be given of church smoking in that era.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

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.

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