Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Tennyson's own devotion to tobacco led, on at least one occasion, to a peculiar and somewhat questionable proceeding. Mr. W.M. Rossetti had a temporary acquaintance with the poet, and in the "Reminiscences" which he published in 1906, he told a curious anecdote concerning him which was new to print. Rossetti told, on the authority of Woolner, how, in the course of a trip with friends to Italy, tobacco such as Tennyson could smoke gave out at some particular city, whereupon the poet packed up his portmanteau and returned home, breaking up the party! The late Joseph Knight, who reviewed Rossetti's volumes in the Athenæum, vouched for the truth of this relation, which he had heard, not only from Woolner, but also from Tennyson's brother Septimus.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

Notwithstanding the few examples given above, tobacconists, more than most tradesmen, seem to have continued to use signs that had at least some relevance to their trade. Abel Drugger was a "tobacco-man," i.e. a tobacco-seller in Ben Jonson's play of "The Alchemist," 1610, so that it is not very surprising to find the name used occasionally as a tobacconist's sign. Towards the end of the eighteenth century one Peter Cockburn traded as a tobacconist at the sign of the "Abel Drugger" in Fenchurch Street, and informed the public on the advertising papers in which he wrapped up his tobacco for customers that he had formerly been shopman at the Sir Roger de Coverley-a notice which has preserved the name of another tobacconist's sign borrowed from literature. Seventeenth-century London signs were the "Three Tobacco Pipes," "Two Tobacco Pipes" crossed, and "Five Tobacco Pipes." At Edinburgh in the eighteenth century there were tobacconists who used two pipes crossed, a roll of tobacco and two leaves over two crossed pipes, and a roll of tobacco and three leaves.

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