The social history of smoking in later Victorian days is marked by the triumph of the cigarette. The introduction of the cigar, as we have seen, brought about the revival of smoking, from the point of view of fashion, in the early decades of the nineteenth century; and the coming of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun.

The earliest references for the word "cigarette" in the Oxford Dictionary are dated 1842 and 1843, but both refer to the smoking of cigarettes abroad—in France and Italy. The 1843 quotation is from a book by Mrs. Romer, in which she says—"The beggars in the streets have paper cigars (called cigarettes) in their mouths." The wording here would seem to show that cigarettes were not then familiar to English people.

Laurence Oliphant, who was both a man of letters and a man of fashion, is generally credited with the introduction into English society of the cigarette; but it is difficult to suggest even an approximate date. Writing from Boulogne to W.H. Wills in September 1854, Dickens says, "I have nearly exhausted the cigarettes I brought here," and proceeds to give directions for some to be sent to him from London. This is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette-smoking in England; but it is possible that by "cigarettes" Dickens meant not what we now know as such, but simply small cigars. Mr. H.M. Hyndman, in his "Record of an Adventurous Life," says that when he was living as a pupil, about the year 1860, with the Rector of Oxburgh, his fellow-pupils included "Edward Abbott of Salonica, who, poor fellow, was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings at the beginning of the Turco-Servian War. Cigarette-smoking, now so popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself, was the first devotee of this habit I encountered."

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."

Thirty years or more ago the late Andrew Lang wrote an article entitled "Enchanted Cigarettes," which began—"To dream our literary projects, Balzac says, is like 'smoking enchanted cigarettes,' but when we try to tackle our projects, to make them real, the enchantment disappears—we have to till the soil, to sow the weed, to gather the leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manufactured, while there may be no market for them after all. Probably most people have enjoyed the fragrance of these cigarettes and have brooded over much which they will never put on paper. Here are some of 'the ashes of the weeds of my delight'—memories of romances whereof no single line is written, or is likely to be written." What Balzac said in his "La Cousine Bette" was—"Penser, rêver, concevoir de belles œuvres est une occupation délicieuse. C'est fumer des cigares enchantés, c'est mener la vie de la courtisane occupée à sa fantaisie." Balzac's cigars became cigarettes in Lang's fantasy. The French novelist seems to have been one of those who praised tobacco without using it much himself. In his "Illusions Perdues" Carlos Herrera, who was Vautrin, says to Lucien, whom he meets on the point of suicide: "Dieu nous a donné le tabac pour endormir nos passions et nos douleurs." M.A. Le Breton, however, in his book on Balzac—"L'Homme et L'Œuvre"—says: "Il ne se soutient qu'à force de café," though he would sit working at his desk for twenty-five hours running.

About the time that Lang's article was written, Sir F.C. Burnand's burlesque, "Bluebeard" was produced at the Gaiety Theatre. In those days a certain type of young man, since known by many names, including the present day "nut," was called a "masher"; and Burnand's burlesque included a duet with the refrain:

We are mashers, we are,
As we smoke our cigar
And crawl along, never too quick;
We are mashers, you bet,
With the light cigarette
And the quite irreproachable stick.