Review of : The Chronicles of John Cannon : Excise Officer and Writing Master, Pt 1, 1684-1733 (Somerset, Oxfordshire, Berkshire)

In 1709, as a recently employed excise officer, John Cannon was ‘importuned . . . to learn to smoak tobacco’ by his supervisor as a skill necessary for ‘company keeping’; and Cannon dutifully resolved to do so:

I got me an ounce of the best Tobacco, a penny worth of Tavern pipes and two or three quarts of beer & ordered the maid to carry these materials to my room & make a fire there, as if I had some friends to pay me a visit which none of my family knew to the contrary. And late at night I came home. All being silent & in bed, I entred my room & fastened my door & sat me down, drinks & fills a pipe, then smoakt, then drank, & then smoak & drinks till all my tobacco was wasted & burnt, my pipes some foul, some broken, my liquor drunk or spilt'd about the room, & myself very much intoxicated & my head whirling about like a windmill or like a weathercock in April, then reaching, then spewing & sick that my room resembled a jakes or a bog house more than a lodging room. (pt. 1, pp. 89–90)
John Cannon's remarkable 600,000-word memoir of his life is quite simply the single most significant piece of British life writing we possess for the period prior to 1750.