One of these old brass penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes was included in the exhibition of Welsh Antiquities held at Cardiff in the summer of 1913.
In the Colchester Museum is an automatic tobacco-box and till of japanned iron. On the lid of the box is painted a keg of tobacco and two clay pipes; and on that of the till the following doggerel lines:
A halfpeny dropt into the till,
Upsprings the lid and you may fill;
When you have filled, without delay,
Shut down the lid, or sixpence pay.
A correspondent of Notes and Queries, in 1908, mentioned that he possessed two of these old penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes, and had come across another in a dealer's shop of a somewhat peculiar make, about which he wished to get information. "It is of the ordinary shape," he wrote, "but differs from any I have previously seen in this respect, that it works with a sixpence, and not with a penny or halfpenny. It is engraved with the usual lines, except that the user is asked to put sixpence in the till, and then to shut down the lid under penalty of a fine of a shilling. What could it have been used for that was worth sixpence a time? Other uncommon features are that the money portion is shallow, and that the part for the tobacco extends the whole length of the box. I should say that the box is much smaller than any others I have ever seen." No information as to the use of this curious box was forthcoming from any of the learned and ingenious correspondents of Notes and Queries; and a problem which they cannot solve may not unreasonably be regarded as insoluble.
Readers of Dickens are familiar with the drawing by Cruikshank which illustrates the chapter on "Scotland Yard" in Dickens's "Sketches by Boz," which was written before 1836. It shows the coal-heavers sitting round the fire shouting out "some sturdy chorus," and smoking long clays. "Here," wrote Dickens, "in a dark wainscoted-room of ancient appearance, cheered by the glow of a mighty fire ... sat the lusty coal-heavers, quaffing large draughts of Barclay's best, and puffing forth volumes of smoke, which wreathed heavily above their heads, and involved the room in a thick dark cloud." These good folk and others of their kin had never been affected by any change of fashion in respect of smoking. In another of the "Sketches," the amusing "Tuggs's at Ramsgate," when poor Cymon Tuggs is hid behind the curtain, half dead with fear, he hears Captain Waters call for brandy and cigars—"The cigars were introduced; the captain was a professed smoker; so was the lieutenant; so was Joseph Tuggs." Poor Cymon, on the other hand, was one of those who could never smoke "without feeling it indispensably necessary to retire, immediately, and never could smell smoke without a strong disposition to cough." Consequently, as the apartment was small, the door closed and the smoke powerful, poor Cymon was soon compelled to cough, which precipitated the catastrophe. It is noticeable that Dickens speaks of the three worthies as professed smokers, a remark which suggests that such dare-devils, men who would take cigars as a matter of course and for enjoyment, and not merely out of a complimentary acquiescence in some one else's wish, were comparatively rare.
Other illustrations of folk who smoked, not cigars, but pipes, may be drawn from "Pickwick," which was published in 1836. At the very beginning, when Mr. Pickwick calls a cab at Saint Martin's-le-Grand, the first cab is "fetched from the public-house, where he had been smoking his first pipe." At Rochester, Mr. Pickwick makes notes on the four towns of Strood, Rochester, Chatham and Brompton, where the military were present in strength, and hence the observant gentleman noted—"The consumption of tobacco in these towns must be very great: and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking." On the evening of the election at Eatanswill, Tupman and Snodgrass resort to the commercial room of the Peacock Inn, where "the atmosphere was redolent of tobacco-smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue to the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains which shaded the windows." Here, among others, were the dirty-faced man with a clay pipe, the very red-faced man behind a cigar, and the man with a black eye, who slowly filled a large Dutch pipe with most capacious bowl. Tupman and Snodgrass were of the company and smoked cigars. Sam Weller's father smoked his pipe philosophically. If Sam's "mother-in-law" "flies in a passion, and breaks his pipe, he steps out and gets another. Then she screams wery loud, and falls into 'sterics; and he smokes wery comfortably 'till she comes to agin." What better example could there be of pipe-engendered philosophy? When Mr. Pickwick and Sam look in at old Weller's house of call off Cheapside, they find the boxes full of stage coachmen, drinking and smoking, and among them is the old gentleman himself, "smoking with great vehemence." After having given his son valuable parental advice, "Mr. Weller, senior, refilled his pipe from a tin box he carried in his pocket, and, lighting his fresh pipe from the ashes of the old one, commenced smoking at a great rate."
A little later when Mr. Pickwick hunts up Perker's clerk Lowten, and joins the jovial circle at the Magpie and Stump, he finds on his right hand "a gentleman in a checked shirt and Mosaic studs, with a cigar in his mouth," who expresses the hope that the newcomer does not "find this sort of thing disagreeable." "Not in the least," replied Mr. Pickwick, "I like it very much, although I am no smoker myself." "I should be very sorry to say I wasn't," interposes another gentleman on the opposite side of the table. "It's board and lodging to me, is smoke." Mr. Pickwick glances at the speaker, and thinks that if it were washing too, it would be all the better!
Later again when the "couple o' Sawbones," the medical students, Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer, make their first appearance on the scene, they are discovered in the morning seated by Mr. Wardle's kitchen fire, smoking cigars; and it is significant of how smoking out of doors was then regarded that Dickens, going on to describe Sawyer in detail, refers to "that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description." Apparently in 1836 the only person who would allow himself to be seen smoking in the street was of the kind naturally inclined to do the other objectionable things mentioned. The same idea runs through the allusions to tobacco in "Pickwick." Smoking was undeniably vulgar. Mr. John Smauker, who introduces Sam Weller at the "friendly swarry" of the Bath footmen, smokes a cigar "through an amber tube"—cigar-holders were a novelty. When Mr. Pickwick is taken to the house of Namby, the sheriffs' officer, the "principal features" of the front parlour are "fresh sand and stale tobacco smoke." One of the occupants of the room is a "mere boy of nineteen or twenty, who, though it was yet barely ten o'clock, was drinking gin and water, and smoking a cigar, amusements to which, judging from his inflamed countenance, he had devoted himself pretty constantly for the last year or two of his life." Tobacco-smoke pervades the Fleet prison. In fact, to trace tobacco through the pages of "Pickwick" is to realize vividly how vulgar if not vicious an accomplishment smoking was considered by the fashionable world and how popular it was among the nobodies of the unfashionable world.
Similar morals may be drawn from other works of fiction. The action of the first chapters of Thackeray's "Pendennis" passes early in the nineteenth century. In the third chapter Foker has a cigar in his mouth as he strolls with Pen down the High Street of Chatteris. Old Doctor Portman meets them and regards "with wonder Pen's friend, from whose mouth and cigar clouds of fragrance issued, which curled round the doctor's honest face and shovel hat. 'An old school-fellow of mine, Mr. Foker,' said Pen. The doctor said 'H'm!' and scowled at the cigar. He did not mind a pipe in his study, but the cigar was an abomination to the worthy gentleman." The reverend gentleman in liking his pipe was faithful to the traditional fondness for smoking of parsons; but smoking must be in the study. To smoke in the street was vulgar; and to smoke the newfangled cigar was worse.
Pendennis, when he comes home the first time from Oxbridge, brings with him a large box of cigars of strange brand, which he smokes "not only about the stables and greenhouses, where they were good" for his mother's plants, and which were obviously places to which a man who wished to smoke should betake himself, but in his own study, which rather shocks his mother. Pen goes from bad to worse during his University days, and, sad to say, one Sunday in the last long vacation, the "wretched boy," instead of going to church, "was seen at the gate of the Clavering Arms smoking a cigar, in the face of the congregation as it issued from St. Mary's. There was an awful sensation in the village society. Portman prophesied Pen's ruin after that, and groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal." Later the smoke from Warrington's short pipe and Pen's cigars floats through many pages of the novel.