It is not uncommon to see a little boy, too young to be out of his mother’s sight, smoking with all the apparent satisfaction of a veteran smoker.'
'Exposed to the cold and wet they find that it warms them up, and the self-indulgence grows upon them. 'Men are frequently injured by smoking, and boys always,' Alger wrote, specifically referring to the 'newsboys and boot-blacks' particularly susceptible to the habit. The narrator of Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches post-Civil War American classic, Ragged Dick (1868), offered perhaps the best, most sympathetic description of a contemporary epidemic almost unthinkable in the 21st century: childhood addiction to cigarettes.
