St Nicotine

Cope Bros & Co Ltd, based in Liverpool, manufactured tobacco products – snuff, cigars, cigarettes, tobacco.

The firm’s publicity material included Cope’s Tobacco Plant and Smoke Room booklets and Cope Bros cigarette cards.

In 1878, an illustration, Peerless Pilgrimage to Saint Nicotine of the Holy Herb, promoting ‘the soothing weed’, drew a great deal of attention. A signpost indicates the route ‘To Ye Shrine of St Nicotine’.  There are cartoons of over sixty contemporary literary and political figures.

Cope’s Modern Pilgrims had Cope’s Key, a decoding card. In the bottom left corner, on the grassy roadside, a blighted potato is depicted.  There are three colorado beetles with the heads of Irish obstructionists. Joseph Biggar (32) sits astride the potato, which is flanked by O’Connor Power (31) and Parnell (33).

Note the simian features of the potato head.

 

Were they all smokers?