Found great benefit from the use of tobacco, though several times he tried to give it up. He smoked the poorest tobacco, however, and Mr. C. Kegan Paul thus describes the care Charles Kingsley took to minimise the dangers of the habit:—

"He would work himself into a white heat over his book, till, too excited to write more, he would calm himself down by a pipe, pacing his grass-plot in thought, and in long strides. He was a great smoker, and tobacco was to him a needful sedative. He always used a long and clean clay pipe, which lurked in all sorts of unexpected places. But none was ever smoked which was in any degree foul, and when there was a vast accumulation of old pipes, they were sent back again to be rebaked, and returned fresh and new. This gave him a striking simile, which in 'Alton Locke,' he puts into the mouth of James Crossthwaite, 'Katie here believes in Purgatory, where souls are burnt clean again, like 'bacca pipes.'"