Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

The tobacco-tongs were more properly called ember-or brand-tongs. They sometimes had a tobacco-stopper riveted in near the axis of the tongs, and thus could be easily distinguished from other kinds of tongs. An example in the Guildhall Museum, made of brass, and probably of late seventeenth-century date, has the end of one of the handles formed into a stopper. In the same collection there are several pairs of ember-tongs with handles or jaws decorated. In one or two a handle terminates in a hook, by which they could be hung up when not required for use. In that delightful book of pictures and gossip concerning old household and farming gear, and old-fashioned domestic plenishings of many kinds, called "Old West Surrey," Miss Jekyll figures two pairs of old ember-or brand-tongs. One of these quite deserves the praise which she bestows upon it. "Its lines," says Miss Jekyll, "fill one with the satisfaction caused by a thing that is exactly right, and with admiration for the art and skill of a true artist." These homely tongs are fashioned with a fine eye for symmetry, and, indeed, for beauty of design and perfect fitness for the intended purpose. The ends which were to pick up the coal are shaped like two little hands, while "the edges have slight mouldings and even a low bead enrichment. The circular flat on the side away from the projecting stopper has two tiny engraved pictures; on one side of the joint a bottle and tall wine-glass, on the other a pair of long clay pipes crossed, and a bowl of tobacco shown in section." This beautiful little implement bears the engraved name of its Surrey maker, and the date 1795.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

There was indeed no diminution of tobacco-smoke in the coffee-houses. A visitor from abroad, Mr. Muralt, a Swiss gentleman, writing about 1696, said that character could be well studied at the coffee-houses. He was probably not a smoker himself, for he goes on to say that in other respects the coffee-houses are "loathsome, full of smoke like a guardroom, and as much crowded." He further observed that it was common to see the clergy of London in coffee-houses and even in taverns, with pipes in their mouths. A native witness of about the same date, Ned Ward, writes sneeringly in his "London Spy," 1699, of the interior of the coffee-house. He saw "some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jingling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot, or a boatswain's cabin.... We each of us stuck in our mouths a pipe of sotweed, and now began to look about us." Ward's contemporary, Tom Brown, took a different tone: he wrote of "Tobacco, Cole and the Protestant Religion, the three great blessings of life!"—as strange a jumble as one could wish for.

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