Of all the tobacco-smoking writers in England over the last century, none wrote more about his smoking habit than George Orwell. Orwell considered tobacco so essential to human existence that he could force everyone in 1984 to live without sugar, chocolate, or even wine, but he could not imagine depriving them of their tobacco ration. Orwell actually best indicates where my story ends. He described an Englishman's addiction to tobacco in his famous essay published in 1946: "Twenty-five pounds a year [his annual expenditure on books] seems a lot until you start comparing him to other types of expenses. It's almost 9 o'clock. 9d. per week, and currently 9s. 9d. a week is equivalent to 83 cigarettes… I spend a lot more on tobacco than on books. I smoke six ounces a week, at half a crown an ounce, which earns me almost £40 a year. Even before the war, when the same tobacco cost 8 pence. per ounce I was spending more than £10 a year… [t]his was probably not much above the national average” (“Books for Cigarettes »).”