Snuff Said

Spinning through the dials on the ol'tube the other night, I came across the 1934 Leslie Howard film, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Howard played that "damned elusive pimpernel." I remember this movie from my youth. It led me to the book by Baroness Orczy which led me to a different Reign of Terror novel, the Dickens' classic, A Tale of Two Cities. 

Like another of my childhood heroes, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel was a tough guy posing as a fop. In the 18th century, fops were so macaroni. 

Ah digression....I'm sure you all know the lyrics to Yankee Doodle. When Yankee Doodle sticks the feather in his cap and calls it macaroni, he was declaring a statement of elegant style. In England in the 1700s, macaroni meant the height of fashion. Of course the song originally was sarcastically sung by the British troops lambasting the colonials as backward bumpkins. Americans being Americans took up the song as a rallying cry. 

Back to the pimpernel (which by the way is a flower) - during his masquerade, Sir Percy Blakeney accentuates his foppish facade by elegantly sniffing snuff wiping way the excess and awaiting the possible sneeze with a lace handkerchief. Watching that scene again, I wondered what ever came of snuff.

This dry, powdered form of tobacco, wide spread in pre-Columbian America, was introduced to Europe by the Spanish. A French minister, Jean Nicot (from whom we get nicotine) brought it to France. There it seemed to "cure" the queen's migraines and became the rage of the upper classes. 

As the tobacco craze grew, smoking was seen as low class. While snuff came to be de rigueur for the nobility. Various flavors, ornate storage vessels and other assorted paraphernalia sprung from snuff's usage. Another industry created by the habit was handkerchiefs. No gentleman worth his snuff would be seen without a hanky. 

Time marched on. As Enlightenment philosophers expounded on equality, the aura of nobility waned. With that came the decline in snuff's popularity, and the rise in tobacco smoking. 

Now a fact that I find fascinating. Early on the popular version of snuff was the dry variety. There was a lesser known moist snuff. This hovered around the edges of tobacco usage. Over a century after the decline of dry snuff, moist snuff's usage began to increase. Known as dipping, just a pinch between the cheek and gum, gave the user a hands-free nicotine fix. 

Yes, ironically the habit originally taken up by the upper crust is now embraced by the working class. This Marxian revolution in smokeless tobacco tickles me to no end. We are truly a crazy species. As ever BB

“Looks like what drives me crazy
Don't have no effect on you--
But I'm gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.”  - Langston Hughes