"He did not immediately open his tinderbox." (April 6, 1814)

“I’m a tobacco-smoker,” Justin admits in Chapter 6 (p. 73), and in Chapter 17, we see him lighting a cigarillo. I have to admit I did no research at all on this, but relied on Georgette Heyer and Bernard Cornwell.

 

Detail from Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, La merienda, 1776

©Museo Nacional del Prado

In Cornwell’s Gallows Thief, one of the protagonists decides to try his hand at importing Spanish cigars to England, where at that time they were extremely hard to come by. 

Bernard Cornwell, Gallows Thief, p. 132

 

I’m not sure where Georgette Heyer’s Hugo Darracott gets his cigars, but both his story (The Unknown Ajax) and Gallows Thief are set in 1817. Both Hugo and Justin picked up the habit while in Spain, both are told that it’s filthy or vile, and both prefer to smoke in the garden. Cigars or cigarillos? At that time there would have been little standardization of the product, either in form or in name, so I assumed that “cigarillo” is simply a small cigar (“cigarro, cigarrillo”; what we call a cigar is today usually denominated a “puro”, from “cigarro puro”, kind of like single malt whisky). Now that I think about it, it would be interesting to find out when people started rolling tobacco in paper rather than tobacco leaves … another time.

Detail from Ángel Lizcano Monedero, Majo, 1876

©Museo Nacional del Prado

How does Hugo light his cigars? We’re not told, but in Heyer’s The Foundling, the hero uses a new-fangled invention called “lucifer” to light a fire – an early form of matchsticks. Since An Independent Heart is set a few years earlier, Justin carries a good old-fashioned tinderbox. This contains flint, steel, and tinder. To strike a light, you slip the steel over your fingers – it’s shaped a bit like a knuckle-duster – and strike the flint in a downward motion that directs the resultant sparks onto the tinder in the box. To light a fire, you would then blow on the tinder to ignite a spill of wood, sometimes dipped in sulfur, but I reckon that to light a cigarillo the glowing embers would suffice.

The tinder could be charcloth or amadou, a leather-like material made from a fungus known as (wait for it) tinder fungus. The ancient lime trees in an old park near where I used to live were home to some splendid specimens. As I stood contemplating them one rainy day, a fellow walker stopped and told me that until well into the twentieth century, all sorts of things were made from amadou, including hats, caps, and gloves!

© Jürgen May

 

Mike Rendell wrote a charming post about tinderboxes for the English Historical Fiction Authors blog back in 2013, but alas, all the pictures have vanished. However, Wikipedia offers pictures of tinderboxes from the early nineteenth century, as well as additional information. My tried and trusted personal photographer, Jürgen May, kindly provided the photo of a tinder fungus here.