Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of three hundred years is complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking has never been so generally practised nor so smiled upon by fashion as it is at the present time. Men in their attitude towards tobacco have always been divisible into three classes—those who respected and followed and obeyed the conventions of society and the dictates of fashion, and smoked or did not smoke in accordance therewith; those who knew those conventions but disregarded them and smoked as and what they pleased; and those who neither knew nor cared whether such conventions existed, or what fashion might say, but smoked as and what, and when and where they pleased. At the present time the three classes tend to combine into one. There are, it is true, a few conventions and restrictions left; but they are not very strong, and will probably disappear one of these days. There is also, of course, and always has been, a fourth class of men, who for one reason or another, quite apart from what fashion may say or do, do not smoke at all.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

One of the earliest known examples of these highlanders as tobacconists' signs is that which was placed at the door of a shop in Coventry Street which was opened in 1720 under the sign of "The Highlander, Thistle and Crown." This is said to have been a favourite place of resort of the Jacobites. In his "Nicotine and its Rariora," Mr. A.M. Broadley gives the card, dated 1765, of "William Kebb, at ye Highlander ye corner of Pall Mall, facing St. James's, Haymarket," and says that the highlander was a favourite tobacconist's sign for 200 years. I have been unable, however, to find evidence of such a prolonged period of favour. I know of no certain seventeenth-century reference to the highlander as a tobacconist's sign.

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