Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 1: Another Elizabethan who is often said to have smoked the first pipe in England is Ralph Lane, the first Governor of Virginia, who came home with Drake in 1586. Lane is said to have given Sir Walter Raleigh an Indian pipe and to have shown him how to use it. There is no original authority, however, for the statement that Lane first smoked tobacco in England, and, moreover, he was not the first English visitor to Virginia to return to this country. One Captain Philip Amadas accompanied Captain Barlow, who commanded on the occasion of Raleigh's first voyage of discovery, when the country was formally taken possession of and named Virginia in honour of Queen Elizabeth. This was early in 1584. The two captains reached England in September 1584, bringing with them the natives of whom King James I, in his "Counter-blaste to Tobacco," speaks as "some two or three Savage men," who "were brought in, together with this Savage custome," i.e. of smoking. It is extremely improbable that Captains Amadas and Barlow, when reporting to Raleigh on their expedition, did not also make him acquainted with the Indian practice of smoking. This would be two years before the return of Ralph Lane.
From Chapter 8: Says the Pipe to the Snuff-box, I can't understand What the ladies and gentlemen see in your face, That you are in fashion all over the land, And I am so much fallen into disgrace. - William Cowper. (From a letter to the Rev. John Newton, May 28, 1782.) " smoking has gone out," said Johnson in talk at St. Andrews, one day in 1773. "To be sure," he continued, "it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes and noses, and having the same thing done to us; yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out." Johnson did not trouble himself to think of how much the vagaries of fashion account for stranger vicissitudes in manners and customs than the rise and fall of the smoking-habit; nor did he probably foresee how slowly but surely the taste for smoking, even in the circles most influenced by fashion, would revive. Boswell tells us that although the sage himself never smoked, yet he had a high opinion of the practice as a sedative influence; and Hawkins heard him say on one occasion that insanity had grown more frequent since smoking had gone out of fashion, which shows that even Johnson could fall a victim to the post hoc propter hoc fallacy.
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