Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

It is pretty clear that not a few of the druggists who sold tobacco were great rascals. Ben Jonson has let us into some of their secrets of adulteration—the treatment of the leaf with oil and the lees of sack, the increase of its weight by other artificial additions to its moisture, washing it in muscadel and grains, keeping it in greased leather and oiled rags buried in gravel under ground, and by like devices. Other writers speak of black spice, galanga, aqua vitæ, Spanish wine, aniseeds and other things as being used for purposes of adulteration.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

The late Bishop Mandell Creighton, of London, was an incessant smoker of cigarettes. Mr. Herbert Paul, in his paper on the Bishop, says that those who went to see him at Fulham on a Sunday afternoon always found him, if they found him at all, "leisurely, chatty, hospitable, and apparently without a care in the world. There was the family tea-table, and there were the eternal cigarettes. The Bishop must have paid a fortune in tobacco-duty." There is a side view of another tobacco-lover in the "Note-Books" of Samuel Butler, the author of "Erewhon." Creighton, after reading Butler's "Alps and Sanctuaries" had asked the author to come and see him. Butler was in doubt whether or not to go, and consulted his clerk, Alfred, on the matter. That wise counsellor asked to look at the Bishop's letter, and then said: "I see, sir, there is a crumb of tobacco in it; I think you can go."

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