Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

At Oxford in early Georgian days a profound calm—so far as study was concerned—appears to have prevailed. Little work was done, but much tobacco was smoked. In 1733 a satire was published, violently attacking the Fellows of various colleges. According to this satirist the occupation of the Magdalen Fellow was to
drink, look big,
Smoke much, think little, curse the freeborn Whig—

from which it may not unreasonably be surmised that the author was a Tory; and however little enthusiasm there may have been at Oxford in those days for learning and study, there was plenty of life in political animosities.

Another witness to the dons' love of tobacco is Thomas Warton. In his "Progress of Discontent," written in 1746, he plaintively sang:

Return, ye days when endless pleasure
I found in reading or in leisure!
When calm around the Common Room
I puff'd my daily pipe's perfume!
Rode for a stomach, and inspected,
At annual bottlings, corks selected:
And dined untax'd, untroubled, under
The portrait of our pious Founder!

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

The highlander, as he existed within living memory at many shop doors, and as he still exists at a few, was and is the survivor of many similar wooden figures as trade signs. The wooden figure of a negro or "Indian" with gilt loin-cloth and feathered head, has already been mentioned as an old tobacconist's sign. In early Georgian days a tobacconist named John Bowden, who dealt in all kinds of snuff, and also in "Aloe, Pigtail, and Wild Tobacco; with all sorts of perfumer's goods, wholesale and retail," traded at the sign of "The Highlander and Black Boy" in Threadneedle Street, London. At York, in this present year, 1914, I came upon a brightly painted wooden figure of Napoleon in full uniform and snuff-box in hand, standing at the door of a small tobacco-shop. Another class of sign or emblem was represented by the "wooden midshipman," which many of us have seen in Leadenhall Street, and which Dickens made famous in "Dombey and Son." Sometimes the wooden figure of a sailor stood outside public-houses with such signs as "The Jolly Sailor"; and a black doll was long a familiar token of the loathly shop kept by the tradesmen mysteriously known as Marine Store Dealers. Images of this kind sometimes stood at the door, or in many cases were placed on brackets or swung from the lintels.

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