only their own servants, but
half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and out! I showed no atom of
surprise, but I never _was_ so surprised, so ridiculously taken aback,
in my life; for in all my experience of 'ladies' of one kind and
another, I never saw a woman--not a basket woman or a gipsy--smoke
before!" This last remark is highly significant. Forster says that
Dickens "lived to have larger and wider experience, but there was
enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described." The
words "cigar" and "cigarette" are used indifferently by the novelist,
but it seems clear from the description and from the number smoked by
the lady in an hour or two, that it was a cigarette and not a cigar,
properly so called, which was never out of her mouth.

The ladies who so surprised Dickens were English and American, but at
the period in question--the early 'forties of the last century--one of
the freaks of fashion at Paris was the giving of luncheon parties for
ladies only, at which cigars were handed round.

The first hints of feminine smoking in England may be traced, like so
many other changes in fashion, in the pages of _Punch_. In 1851,
steady-going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived
outburst of "bloomerism," imported from the United States. Of course
it was at once suggested that women who would go so far as to imitate
masculine attire and to emancipate themselves from the usual
conventions of feminine dress, would naturally seek to imitate men in
other ways also. Leech had a picture of "A Quiet Smoke" in _Punch_,
which depicted five ladies in short wide skirts and "bloomers" in a
tobacconist's shop, two smoking cigars and one a pipe, while "one of
the inferior animals" behind the counter was selling tobacco. But this
was satire and hardly had much relation to fact.

It was not until the 'sixties of the last century that
cigarette-smoking by women began to creep in. Mortimer Collins,
writing in 1869, in a curious outburst against the use of tobacco by
young men, said, "When one hears of sly cigarettes between feminine
lips at croquet parties, there is no more to be said." Since that date
cigarette-smoking has become increasingly popular among women, and the
term "sly" has long ceased to be applicable. "Punch's Pocket-Book" for
1878 had an amusing skit on a ladies' reading-party, to which Mr.
Punch acted as "coach." After breakfast the reading ladies lounged on
the lawn with cigarettes