Accelerated Learning

From Chapter 9:
Later again when the "couple o' Sawbones," the medical students, Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer, make their first appearance on the scene, they are discovered in the morning seated by Mr. Wardle's kitchen fire, smoking cigars; and it is significant of how smoking out of doors was then regarded that Dickens, going on to describe Sawyer in detail, refers to "that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description." Apparently in 1836 the only person who would allow himself to be seen smoking in the street was of the kind naturally inclined to do the other objectionable things mentioned. The same idea runs through the allusions to tobacco in "Pickwick." smoking was undeniably vulgar. Mr. John Smauker, who introduces Sam Weller at the "friendly swarry" of the Bath footmen, smokes a cigar "through an amber tube"—cigar-holders were a novelty. When Mr. Pickwick is taken to the house of Namby, the sheriffs' officer, the "principal features" of the front parlour are "fresh sand and stale tobacco smoke." One of the occupants of the room is a "mere boy of nineteen or twenty, who, though it was yet barely ten o'clock, was drinking gin and water, and smoking a cigar, amusements to which, judging from his inflamed countenance, he had devoted himself pretty constantly for the last year or two of his life." Tobacco-smoke pervades the Fleet prison. In fact, to trace tobacco through the pages of "Pickwick" is to realize vividly how vulgar if not vicious an accomplishment smoking was considered by the fashionable world and how popular it was among the nobodies of the unfashionable world.

From Chapter 14:
Evidently the intention was to make things pleasant for the royal foe of tobacco during his visit. It would appear to be a fair inference from the wording of this prohibition that when the King was not at Cambridge, graduates and scholars and students could resume their liberty to resort to inns, taverns, ale-houses and tobacco-shops, and presumably to take tobacco in St. Mary's Church, without question.

The prohibition, in the regulation quoted, of smoking in St. Mary's Church, referred, it may be noted, to the Act which was held therein. Candidates for degrees, or graduates to display their proficiency, publicly maintained theses; and this performance was termed keeping or holding an Act.
It is, of course, conceivable that the prohibition, so far as the church and Trinity College Hall were concerned, was against the taking of snuff rather than against smoking; but the phrase "to take tobacco" was at that time quite commonly applied to smoking, and, considering the extraordinary and immoderate use of tobacco soon after its introduction, it is not in the least incredible that pipes were lighted, at least occasionally, even in sacred buildings.