Chapter 9 Part 2
SIGNS OF REVIVAL
Other men of letters of the time were zealous adherents of the pipe.
One of these was the poet Campbell. From 1820 to 1830 he was editor of
the New Monthly Magazine, and is reputed to have been so very
unbusinesslike in his methods that there was always difficulty in
getting proofs corrected and returned in good time. On one occasion,
as reported by a member of the firm that printed the magazine, a proof
had been lost, and the poet was informed that the article must go to
press next day uncorrected. Campbell sent word that he would look in
in the morning and correct it. Preparations were duly made to receive
him; he was shown into the best room, and left with the proof on his
table. After a while he rang the bell, and said, "I could do this much
better if I had a pipe." Thereupon pipe and tobacco were procured and
taken in to him. Campbell tore open the paper containing the tobacco,
and, with a slightly contemptuous expression, exclaimed, "Ugh!
C'naster! I'd rather it had been shag!"
Charles Lamb was a heavy pipe-smoker. He smoked too much—regretted
it—but continued to smoke, not wisely but too well. "He came home
very smoky and drinky last night," says his sister of him.
When sending some books to Coleridge at Keswick in November 1802, Lamb
wrote—"If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled
with a crumb of right Gloucester, blacked in the candle (my usual
supper), or peradventure, a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the
crevices, look to that passage more especially: depend upon it, it
contains good matter." To Lamb, a book read best over a pipe.
The following year he wrote to Coleridge—"What do you think of
smoking? I want your sober, average, noon opinion, of it. I
generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it.
Morning is a girl, and can't smoke—she's no evidence one way or the
other; and Night is so evidently bought over, he can't be a very
upright judge. Maybe the truth is that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome, and that's the sum on't. But that is deciding
rather upon rhyme than reason.... After all, our instincts may be
best." It is clear from one or two references, that Lamb and Coleridge
had been accustomed to smoke together at their meetings in early days
at the "Salutation and Cat"—with less disastrous results to
Coleridge, it is to be hoped, than those which followed his Birmingham
smoke, as set forth in the preceding chapter.
In 1805 Lamb wrote to Wordsworth—"now I have bid farewell to my
'sweet enemy' tobacco ... I shall, perhaps, set nobly to work."
Forthwith he set to work on the farce "Mr. H.," which some months
later was produced at Drury Lane and was promptly damned. After its
failure Lamb wrote to Hazlitt—"We are determined not to be cast down.
I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man
must write smoky farces." But Lamb and his pipe were not to be parted
by even repeated resolutions to leave off smoking. It was years after
this that he met Macready at Talfourd's, and by way probably of saying
something to shock Macready; whose personality could hardly have been
sympathetic to him, uttered the remarkable wish that the last breath
he drew in might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.
It was in 1818 that Lamb published the collection of his writings, in
two volumes, which contained the well-known "Farewell to Tobacco,"
written in 1805, and referred to in the letter of that year to
Wordsworth quoted above. Its phrases of mingled abuse and affection
are familiar to lovers of Lamb.
Parr is reported to have once asked Lamb how he could smoke so much
and so fast, and Lamb is said to have replied—"I toiled after it,
sir, as some men toil after virtue." But if all accounts are true,
Parr far outsmoked Lamb. If the essayist discontinued or modified his
smoking habits, he made up for it by devotion to snuff—a devotion
which his sister shared. A large snuff-box usually lay on the table
between them, and they pushed it one to the other.
But it is time to return to the cigar, and the changing attitude of
fashion towards smoking.
There would appear to have been some smokers who disliked the
new-fangled cigars . Angelo seems, from various passages in his
"Reminiscences," to have been a smoker, and to have been very
frequently in the company of smokers, yet he could write: "There are
few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that
we are again in England, than the superiority of our stage-coaches.
There is something very exhilarating in being carried through the air
with rapidity ... considering the rate at which stage-coaches now
travel [i.e. in and just before 1830] ... a place on the box or
front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat. But alas!
no human enjoyment is free from alloy. A Jew pedlar or mendicant
foreigner with his cigar in his mouth, has it in his power to turn the
draft of sweet air into a cup of bitterness." Perhaps Angelo's
objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by
a "Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner," than to the cigar itself. Yet,
going on to describe a journey to Hastings, sitting "on the roof in
front" beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment
of dashing along, anecdote and jest going merrily on, "we had the
annoyance of a coxcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air
which Heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar,"
which looks as if his real objection was to cigars , as such.
The fashionable dislike of tobacco-smoke appears in the pages of
another descriptive writer—the once well known N.P. Willis, the
American author of many books of travel and gossip. In his
"Pencillings by the Way," writing in July 1833, Willis describes the
prevalence of smoking in Vienna among all the nationalities that
thronged that cosmopolitan capital. "It is," he says, "like a fancy
ball. Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians,
Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and stinking costumes,
promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest
observation. Every third window is a pipe-shop, and they [presumably
the pipes] show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of
the passion. Some of them are marked '200 dollars.' The streets reek
with tobacco-smoke . You never catch a breath of untainted air within
the Glacis. Your hotel, your café, your coach, your friend, are all
redolent of the same disgusting odour." In the following year,
describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon's in Scotland,
Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed
up and "conversation assumed a merrier cast," then "coffee and
liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more
slowly," and at eleven o'clock there was a general move to the
drawing-room. The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four
hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain
from Willis's silence on the subject—the "disgusting odour" would
surely have disturbed him—that no single member of the large
dinner-party dreamed of smoking, or, at all events, attempted to
smoke.
By 1830 smoking had so far "come in" again that a considerable
proportion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers.
Macaulay has drawn for us the not very attractive picture of the
smoking-room of the old House of Commons—before the fire of 1834—in
a letter to his sister dated in the summer of 1831. "I have left Sir
Francis Burdett on his legs," he wrote, "and repaired to the
smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables
covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is
generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a
perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen (tell it not to the West
Indians), Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not
believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open,
and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself."
In July 1832 he again dated a letter to his sisters from the House of
Commons smoking-room. "I am writing here," he says, "at eleven at
night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres ... with the smell
of tobacco in my nostrils.... Reject not my letter, though it is
redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room—
The room,—but I think I'll describe it in rhyme,
That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime.
The smell of tobacco was always the same:
But the chloride was bought since the cholera came."
The mention of pigtail shows that the House contained pipe- as well as
cigar-smokers. A few days later he wrote again to his sisters, but
this time from the library, where, he says, "we are in a far better
atmosphere than in the smoking-room, whence I wrote to you last week."
One wonders why Macaulay, who apparently did not smoke himself, and
who, though somewhat more tolerant of tobacco than his father, Zachary
Macaulay, evidently did not like the atmosphere of the smoking-room,
chose to write there, when the library—where he must surely have felt
more at home—was available.
Among other well-known men of standing and fashion who were smokers
about this period may be named Lord Eldon, Lord Stowell, Brougham,
Lord Calthorp and H.R.H. the Duke of Sussex. In Thackeray's "Book of
Snobs," Miss Wirt, the governess at Major Ponto's, refers in shocked
tones to "H.R.H. the poor dear Duke of Sussex (such a man my dears,
but alas! addicted to smoking!)."
Sad to say, the Royal Duke was not content with the cigar that was
becoming fashionable, but actually smoked a pipe. Mrs. Stirling, in
"The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope," 1913, notes that
Lord Althorp was a frequent visitor about 1822 at Holkham, the
well-known seat of Mr. Coke of Norfolk, later Lord Leicester, and that
on such occasions he enjoyed "the distinction of being the only guest
besides the Duke of Sussex who ever indulged in the rare habit of
smoking. But while the Royal Duke was wont to puff away at a long
meerschaum in his bedroom till he actually blinded himself, and all
who came near him, Fidèle Jack [Lord Althorp's nickname] behaved in
more considerate fashion, only smoking out of doors as he passed
restlessly up and down the grass terrace."
With the revival of smoking, things changed at Holkham. On Christmas
Day, 1847, Lady Elizabeth, writing to her husband from Holkham, the
home of her childhood, remarked: "The Billiard table is always lighted
up for the gentlemen when they come from shooting, and there they sit
smoking." The growing popularity of the cigar made smoking less unfashionable
than it had been among the upper classes of society; but among humbler
folk pipe-smoking had never "gone out." Every public-house did its
regular trade in clays, known as churchwardens and Broseleys, and by
other names either of familiarity or descriptive of the place of
manufacture; and on the mantelpiece or table of inn or ale-house stood
the tobacco-box. Miss Jekyll, in her delightful book on "Old West
Surrey," figures an example of these old public-house tobacco-boxes
which is made of lead. It has bosses of lions' heads at the ends, and
a portrait in relief on the front of the Duke of Wellington in his
plumed cocked hat. Inside, there is a flat piece of sheet-lead with a
knob to keep the tobacco pressed close, so that it may not dry up. |
