Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

The prejudice against the pipe is not confined to places of indoor resort. There are many men who smoke pipes within doors, who yet would not care to be seen in London smoking a pipe in the street, or in the park. In some circumstances this is quite intelligible. The writer of the Morning Post article remarked with much force and good sense that "Apart from social environment, there is a certain affinity between pipes and clothes. It is considered 'bad form' for a man in a frock-coat and silk hat to be seen smoking a pipe in the streets. If you are wearing a bowler hat and a lounge suit you may walk along with a briar protruding from your lips, and no one will think ill of you. If you are a son of toil garbed in your habit as you work, there is nothing incongruous in a well-seasoned clay or a 'nose-warmer,' which, for convenience, you carry upside down. Not so very long ago it was considered unseemly to smoke a pipe at all in the street unless you belonged to the humbler orders, who inhale their nicotine through the stem of a clay and expectorate with a greater sense of freedom than of responsibility."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

Notwithstanding the few examples given above, tobacconists, more than most tradesmen, seem to have continued to use signs that had at least some relevance to their trade. Abel Drugger was a "tobacco-man," i.e. a tobacco-seller in Ben Jonson's play of "The Alchemist," 1610, so that it is not very surprising to find the name used occasionally as a tobacconist's sign. Towards the end of the eighteenth century one Peter Cockburn traded as a tobacconist at the sign of the "Abel Drugger" in Fenchurch Street, and informed the public on the advertising papers in which he wrapped up his tobacco for customers that he had formerly been shopman at the Sir Roger de Coverley-a notice which has preserved the name of another tobacconist's sign borrowed from literature. Seventeenth-century London signs were the "Three Tobacco Pipes," "Two Tobacco Pipes" crossed, and "Five Tobacco Pipes." At Edinburgh in the eighteenth century there were tobacconists who used two pipes crossed, a roll of tobacco and two leaves over two crossed pipes, and a roll of tobacco and three leaves.

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