From Chapter 11: Fairholt, in his book on "Tobacco," which was published in 1859, mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central America, but makes no reference to their use in this country.
The late Lady Dorothy Nevill said that although cigarettes are a modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "when old Peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece of paper. They called this a
papelito, and I fancy it was much the same thing as a cigarette." But if this were so, the habit must have died out long before the cigarette, as we now know it, came into vogue.
It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there may have been an occasional cigarette-
smoker in England, like the Edward Abbott of Mr. Hyndman's reminiscences, yet it was not until a little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls
of tobacco became at all common among Englishmen; and it is quite likely that the credit (or discredit, as the reader pleases) of bringing them into general, and especially into fashionable, use, has been rightly given to Laurence Oliphant.
Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870. In "Puck," which was published in that year, Ouida—who is hardly an unimpeachable authority on the ways and customs of fashionable folk, though she loved to paint fancy pictures of their sayings and doings—pictures the Row: "the most fashionable lounge you have, but it is a Republic for all that." There, she says, "could Bill Jacobs lean against a rail, with a clay-pipe in his mouth, and a terrier under his arm, close beside the Earl of Guilliadene, with his cigarette and his eye-glass, and his Poole-cut habiliments."
From Chapter 14: Another eighteenth-century instance of
smoking in church, taken from historical fact and not from fiction, is associated with the church of Hayes, in Middlesex. The parish registers of that village bear witness to repeated disputes between the parson and bell-ringers and the parishioners generally in 1748-1754. In 1752 it was noted that a sermon had been preached after a funeral "to a noisy congregation." On another occasion, says the register, "the ringers and other inhabitants disturbed the service from the beginning of prayers to the end of the sermon, by ringing the bells, and going into the gallery to spit below"; while at yet another time "a fellow came into church with a pot of beer and a pipe," and remained "
smoking in his own pew until the end of the sermon." Going to church at Hayes in those days must have been quite an exciting experience. No one knew what might happen next.
