From Chapter 11: When life was all a summer day,
And I was under twenty,
Three loves were scattered in my way—
And three at once are plenty.
Three hearts, if offered with a grace,
One thinks not of refusing.
The task in this especial case
Was only that of choosing.
I knew not which to make my pet—
My pipe, cigar, or cigarette.
- Henry S. Leigh.
The social history of
smoking in later Victorian days is marked by the triumph of the cigarette. The introduction of the cigar, as we have seen, brought about the revival of
smoking, from the point of view of fashion, in the early decades of the nineteenth century; and the coming of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun.
From Chapter 15:The "Tobacco Roll," either alone or in various combinations, was one of the commonest of early tobacconists' signs, and was in constant use for a couple of centuries. It may still be occasionally seen at the present time in the form of the "twist" with alternate brown or black and yellow coils, which up to quite a recent date was a tolerably frequent adornment
of tobacconists' shops, but is now rare. This roll represented what was called spun or twist tobacco. Dekker, in James I's time, speaks of roll tobacco. The youngster who mimics the stage-gallants in Jonson's "Cynthia's Revels" as described in Chapter II (
ante; page 31), says that he has "three sorts
of tobacco in his pocket," which probably means that it was customary to mix for
smoking purposes tobacco of the three usual kinds—roll (or pudding), leaf and cane. One would have thought that a representation of the tobacco plant itself would have been a more natural and comprehensive sign than one particular preparation of the herb, yet representations of the plant were rare, while those of the compressed tobacco known as pudding or roll in the form of a "Tobacco Roll," as described above, were very frequently used as signs.