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.
A curious and popular variety of tobacco-box often to be found in rural inns and ale-houses was made somewhat on the principle of the now everywhere familiar automatic machines. The late Mr. Frederick Gale, in a column of "Tobacco Reminiscences," which he contributed to the Globe newspaper in 1899, said, that at village outdoor festivals of the 'thirties and early 'forties, respectable elderly farmers and tradesmen would sit "round a table, on which was an automatic, square, brass tobacco-box of large dimensions, into which the smokers dropped a halfpenny and the lid flew back, and the publican trusted to the smoker's honour to fill his pipe and close the box." When the pipes were filled they were lighted by means of tinder-box and flint, and a stable lanthorn supplied by the ostler. A penny would appear to have been a more usual charge, for a frequent inscription on the lid was:
The custom is, before you fill,
To put a penny in the till;
When you have filled, without delay
Close the lid, or sixpence pay.