Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Country-folk nowadays often light their pipes in the old way, by picking up a live coal, or, in Ireland, a fragment of glowing peat, from the kitchen fire, with the ordinary tongs, and applying it to the pipe-bowl; but the old ember-tongs are seldom seen. They may still be found in some farmhouses and country cottages, which have not been raided by the agents of dealers in antique furniture and implements, but examples are rare. This is a digression, however, which has carried us far away from the early years of the seventeenth century.

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

The sellers of tobacco naturally hung out their signs like other tradesfolk. Signs in their early days were, no doubt, chosen to intimate the trades of those who used them, and in the easy-going old-fashioned days when it was considered the right and natural thing for a son to be brought up to his father's trade and to succeed him therein, they long remained appropriate and intelligible. Later, as we shall see, they became meaningless in many cases. But in the days when tobacco-smoking first came into vogue, the signs chosen naturally had some reference to the trade they indicated, and one of the earliest used was the sign of the "Black Boy," in allusion to the association of the negro with tobacco cultivation. The "Black Boy" existed as a shop-sign before tobacco's triumph, for Henry Machyn in his "Diary," so early as December 30, 1562, mentions a goldsmith "dwellying at the sene of the Blake Boy, in the Cheep"; but the early sellers of tobacco soon fastened on this appropriate sign. The earliest reference to such use may be found in Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, where, in the first scene, Humphrey Waspe says: "I thought he would have run mad o' the Black Boy in Bucklersbury, that takes the scurvy, roguy tobacco there." Later, the "Black Boy," like other once significant signs, became meaningless and was used in connexion with various trades. Early in the eighteenth century a bookseller at the sign of the "Black Boy" on London Bridge was advertising Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe"; another bookseller traded at the "Black Boy" in Paternoster Row in 1712. Linendrapers, hatters, pawnbrokers and other tradesmen all used the same sign at various dates in the eighteenth century. But side by side with this indiscriminate and unnecessary use of the sign there existed a continuous association of the "Black Boy" with the tobacco trade. A tobacconist named Milward lived at the "Black Boy" in Redcross Street, Barbican, in 1742; and many old tobacco papers show a black boy, or sometimes two, smoking. Mr. Holden MacMichael, in his papers on "The London Signs" says: "Mrs. Skinner, of the old-established tobacconist's opposite the Law Courts in the Strand, possessed, about the year 1890, two signs of the 'Black Boy,' appertaining, no doubt, to the old house of Messrs. Skinner's on Holborn Hill, of the front of which there is an illustration in the Archer Collection in the Print Department of the British Museum, where the black boy and tobacco-rolls are depicted outside the premises." The "Black Boy," indeed, continued in use by tobacconists until the nineteenth century was well advanced. A tobacconist had a shop "uppon Wapping Wall" in 1667 at the sign of the "Black Boy and Pelican."

Read More