Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

In Townley's well-known two-act farce "High Life Below Stairs," 1759, the servants take their masters' and mistresses' titles and ape their ways. The menservants—the Dukes and Sir Harrys—offer one another snuff. "Taste this snuff, Sir Harry," says the "Duke." "'Tis good rappee," replies "Sir Harry." "Right Strasburgh, I assure you, and of my own importing," says the knowing ducal valet. "The city people adulterate it so confoundedly," he continues, "that I always import my own snuff;" and in similar vein he goes on in imitation of his master, the genuine Duke. These servants copy the talk and style (with a difference) of their employers; but smoking is never mentioned. The real Dukes and Sir Harrys took snuff with a grace, but they did not do anything so low as to smoke, and their menservants faithfully aped their preferences and their aversions.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

The properly accomplished gallant not only professed to be curiously learned in pipes and tobacco, but his knowledge of prices and their fluctuations, of the apothecaries' and other shops where the herb was sold, and of the latest and most fashionable ways of inhaling and exhaling the smoke, was, like Mr. Weller's knowledge of London, "extensive and peculiar." It was knowledge of this kind that gained for a gallant reputation and respect by no means to be acquired by mere scholarship and learning.

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