and the same writer describes tobacco as "By ladies hated, hated by the beaux." Although the fine lady may have affected to swoon at the sight of pipes, and belles generally, like the beaux, may have disdained tobacco as vulgar, yet there were doubtless still to be found here and there respectable women who occasionally indulged in a smoke. In an early Spectator, Addison gives the rules of a "Twopenny Club, erected in this Place, for the Preservation of Friendship and good Neighbourhood," which met in a little ale-house and was frequented by artisans and mechanics. Rule II was, "Every member shall fill his pipe out of his own box"; and Rule VII was, "If any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or smokes."
In one of the valuable volumes issued by the Georgian Society of Dublin a year or two ago, Dr. Mahaffy, writing on the mid-eighteenth century society of the Irish capital, quotes an advertisement by a Dublin tobacconist of "mild pigtail for ladies" which suggests the alarming question—Did Irish ladies chew?
It has sometimes been supposed that the companion of Swift's Stella, Mrs. Rebecca Dingley, was addicted to smoking. In the letters which make up the famous "Journal to Stella," there are several references by Swift to the presents of tobacco which he was in the habit of sending to Mrs. Dingley. On September 21, 1710, he wrote: "I have the finest piece of Brazil tobacco for Dingley that ever was born." In the following month he again had a great piece of Brazil tobacco for the same lady, and again in November: "I have made Delaval promise to send me some Brazil tobacco from Portugal for you, Madam Dingley." In December, Swift was expressing his hope that Dingley's tobacco had not spoiled the chocolate which he had sent for Stella in the same parcel; and three months later he wrote: "No news of your box? I hope you have it, and are this minute drinking the chocolate, and that the smell of the Brazil tobacco has not affected it." The explanation of all this tobacco for Mistress Dingley is to be found in Swift's letter to Stella of October 23, 1711. "Then there's the miscellany," he writes, "an apron for Stella, a pound of chocolate, without sugar, for Stella, a fine snuff-rasp of ivory, given me by Mrs. St. John for Dingley, and a large roll of tobacco which she must hide or cut shorter out of modesty, and four pair of spectacles for the Lord knows who." The tobacco was clearly not for smoking, but for Dingley to operate upon with the snuff-rasp, and so supply herself with snuff—a luxury, which in those days, was as much enjoyed and as universally used by women as by men.
Even Quakeresses sometimes smoked. A list of the sea-stores put on board the ship in which certain friends—Samuel Fothergill, Mary Peisly, Katherine Payton and others—sailed from Philadelphia for England in June 1756, is still extant. In those days Atlantic passages were long, and might last for an indefinite period, and passengers provisioned themselves accordingly. On this occasion the passage though stormy was very quick, for it lasted only thirty-four days. The list of provisions taken is truly formidable. It includes all sorts of eatables and drinkables in astonishing quantities. The "Women's Chest," we are told, contained, among a host of other good and useful things, "Balm, sage, summer Savoury, horehound, Tobacco, and Oranges; two bottles of Brandy, two bottles of Jamaica Spirrit, A Canister of green tea, a Jar of Almond paste, Ginger bread." Samuel Fothergill's "new chest" contained tobacco among many other things; and a box of pipes was among the miscellaneous stores.
The history of smoking by women through Victorian days need not detain us long. There have always been pipe-smokers among the women of the poorer classes. Up to the middle of the last century smoking was very common among the hard-working women of Northumberland and the Scottish border. Nor has the practice by any means yet died out. In May 1913, a woman, who was charged with drunkenness at the West Ham police court, laid the blame for her condition on her pipe. She said she had smoked it for twenty years, and "it always makes me giddy!" The writer, in August 1913, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.
It is not so very long ago that an English traveller heard a working-man courteously ask a Scottish fish-wife, who had entered a smoking-compartment of the train, whether she objected to smoking. The good woman slowly produced a well-seasoned "cutty" pipe, and as she began to cut up a "fill" from a rank-smelling tobacco, replied: "Na, na, laddie, I've come in here for a smoke ma'sel."
The Darlington and Stockton Times in 1856 recorded the death on December 10, at Wallbury, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the 110th year of her age, of Jane Garbutt, widow. Mrs. Garbutt had been twice married, her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic wars. The old woman, said the journal, "had dwindled into a small compass, but she was free from pain, retaining all her faculties to the last, and enjoying her pipe. About a year ago the writer of this notice paid her a visit, and took her, as a 'brother-piper,' a present of tobacco, which ingredient of bliss was always acceptable from her visitors. Asking of her the question how long she had smoked, her reply was 'Vary nigh a hundred years'!" In 1845 there died at Buxton, at the age of ninety-six, a woman named Pheasy Molly, who had been for many years an inveterate smoker. Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire. She had burned herself more than once before in performing the same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her end.
The old Irishwomen who were once a familiar feature of London street-life as sellers of apples and other small wares at street corners, were often hardened smokers; and so were, and doubtless still are, many of the gipsy women who tramp the country. An old Seven Dials ballad has the following choice stanza—
When first I saw Miss Bailey,
'Twas on a Saturday,
At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,
And smoking a yard of clay.
Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign female smoking in the nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned. Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be whispered that here and there a lady—who was usually considered dreadfully "fast" for her pains—was accustomed to venture upon a cigarette.