Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

The social attitude towards smoking in early Victorian days, and for some time later, was curious. The development of cigar-smoking among those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished, and the natural consequent spread downwards of the use of cigars—in accordance with the invariable law of fashion—together with the continued devotion to the pipe among those whose love of tobacco had never slackened, made smoking a much more general practice than it had been for some generations.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

Byron is reputed to have been another cigar-smoker. His apostrophe to tobacco in "The Island" (1823), a poem founded in part on the history of the Mutiny of the Bounty, is familiar. The lines are, indeed, almost the only familiar passage in that poem:

Sublime tobocco!
which, from east to west,
Cheers the tar's labours or the Turkman's rest;
Which on the Moslem's ottoman divides
His hours, and rivals opium and his brides;
Magnificent in Stamboul, but less grand,
Though not less loved, in Wapping or the Strand:
Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe,
When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe;
Like other charmers, wooing the caress,
More dazzlingly when daring in full dress;
Yet thy true lovers more admire by far
Thy naked beauties—Give me a cigar!

How far these lines really represent the poet's own sentiments, and whether he habitually smoked either cigar or pipe, is another matter.

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