Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

It has sometimes been said that Swift smoked; but this is a mistake. He had a fancy for taking tobacco in a slightly different way from the fashionable mode of taking snuff. He told Stella that he had left off snuff altogether, and then in the very next sentence remarked that he had "a noble roll of tobacco for grating, very good." And in a later letter to Stella, May 24, 1711, he asked if she still snuffed, and went on to say, in sentences that seem to contradict one another: "I have left it off, and when anybody offers me their box, I take about a tenth part of what I used to do, then just smell to it, and privately fling the rest away. I keep to my tobacco still, as you say; but even much less of that than formerly, only mornings and evenings, and very seldom in the day." One might infer from this that he smoked, but this Swift never did. His practice was to snuff up cut and dried tobacco, which was sometimes just coloured with Spanish snuff. This he did all his life, but as the mixture he took was not technically snuff, he never owned that he took snuff.

Another cleric of the period, well known to fame, who took snuff but also loved his pipe, was Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire, from 1697 to 1735. He not only smoked his pipe, but sang its praises:

In these raw mornings, when I'm freezing ripe,
What can compare with a tobacco-pipe?
Primed, cocked and toucht, 'twould better heat a man
Than ten Bath Faggots or Scotch warming-pan.

Samuel's greater son, John Wesley, did not share the parental love of a pipe. He spoke of the use of tobacco as "an uncleanly and unwholesome self-indulgence," and described snuffing as "a silly, nasty, dirty custom."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 4:

In this "Diary," covering the years 1631-43, there are some forty entries concerning the purchase of what is always, save in one case, called "tobacka." These entries give valuable information as to the prices of the two chief kinds of tobacco. One was imported from Spanish America, which up to 1639 Hayne calls "Varinaes," and after that date "Spanish"; the other was imported from English colonies—chiefly from Virginia. The "Varinaes" kind, Dr. Brushfield suggests, was obtained from Varina, near the foot of the range of mountains forming the west boundary of Venezuela, and watered by a branch of the Orinoco River. Hayne also notes the purchase of "Tertudoes" tobacco, but what that may have been I cannot say. From the various entries relating respectively to Varinaes or Spanish tobacco, and to Virginia tobacco, it is clear that the former ranged in price from 8s. to 13s. per lb., while the latter was from 1s. 6d. to 4s. per lb. There is one entry of "perfumed Tobacka," 10 oz. of which were bought at the very high price of 15s. 6d.

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