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Show SMOKERS IN DICKENS' WORKS Great Novelist Had Many of His Char-1 Char-1 acters Use Tobacco in One Form or Another. '. The "cigarettes" mentioned by Dickens Dick-ens In 1857 were "brown paper cigars," an Informant writes to the London ' t 'hronicle, and were evidently rolled by hand In the fashion not unknown today, to-day, though rapidly being superseded by the machine-made article. In the first chapter of "Little Dor-rit," Dor-rit," written in ISiiT, the villain ltiguad In his jail at Marseilles has tobacco brought to him with his rations and he rolls it "into cigarettes by the aid of little squares of paper which had been brought in with It." The scene, by the way, Is dated by Dickens "thirty years ago." Whether the paper was white or brown does not appear, but It seems clear enough that the smokes in question, ques-tion, thus rolled In a prison cell, had more likeness to the modern cigarette than to a cigar, although the novelist sometimes calls them little paper jlgars. 1 ""Little Dorrlt," I think, adds the correspondent, cor-respondent, is the first of the novels In which the word "cigarette" appears. ' although pipes and cigars are freqnent- ly mentioned, usually in the mouths of the morally less admirable characters. , Montague Tlgg and Chevy Slyme both ' move in an atmosphere in which tobac-1 tobac-1 co is added to frowsiness. Rogue ) ftiderhood's rascality is heightened by his use of a pipe, and the depth of Qullp's Inhumunlty is emphasized by his abilities In the way of what is now called "chain smoking" with cigars, , while he swallows boiling rum from a ' pannikin kept on the fire. Eugene 1 Wrayburn's languid idleness Is solaced by cigars, but correct characters, such us John Harmon, never touch what 1 Tony W'eller calls "the flagrant weed." i |
