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 all the men of 1984 to live without sugar, chocolate or wine, but he could not imagine depriving him of his tobacco allowance. It is in fact Orwell who best indicates where my story ends. He describes an Englishman's addiction to tobacco in his infamous essay published in 1946: “Twenty-five pounds a year [his annual expenditure on books] seems like a lot until you begin to measure it against other types of expenditure. It's almost 9. 9d. a week, and at present 9s. 9d. a week is equivalent to 83 cigarettes... I spend much more on tobacco than on books. I smoke six ounces a week, at half a crown an ounce, gaining nearly 40 pounds a year. Even before the war when the same tobacco cost 8p. per ounce, I spent more than 10 pounds a year on it… [probably] not much above the national average” (“Books vs. Cigarettes”