“People do all sorts of things at picnics” is Howells’s paradoxical foreshadowing of a love match that begins on a picnic on the rocky shore of the Bay of Fundy and then goes wrong. Though the picnickers are convivial, they mask their feelings, at least for appearance’s sake. The seashore is a mixture of ordinary details suggesting a dismal future. The title April Hopes is from Alfred Tennyson’s “The Vision of Sin” (1842), a brooding unpicnicky poem. Howells was struck with its relation to his love theme:
Tell me tales of thy first love—
April hopes, the fools of chance;
Till the graves begin to move,
And the dead begin to dance.
Howells contrast’s the natural beauty of the Fundy shoreline and its view of the sea with trash accruing when an excellent place to picnic becomes popular: “Four or five carriages, driven by the gentlemen of the party, held the picnic, which was destined for that beautiful cove on the Bay of Fundy where the red granite ledges, smooth-washed by ages of storm and sun, lend themselves to such festivities as if they had been artificially fashioned into shelves and tables. The whole place is yet so new to men that this haunt has not acquired that air of repulsive custom which the eggshells and broken bottles and sardine boxes of many seasons give. Or perhaps the winter tempests heap the tides of the bay over the ledge, and wash it clean of these vulgar traces of human resort and enable it to offer as fresh a welcome to the picnics of each successive summer as if there had never been a picnic in that place before.”
Scott Leslie. The Bay of Fundy at Dusk (2014)
The picnic food is bland. Even though it’s their picnic, some of the women) complain:
“I wonder why always boiled ham at a picnic!” said the lady who took a final plate of it from a basket.
“Under the ordinary conditions, few of us can be persuaded to touch it.”
“It seems to be dear to nature, and to nature’s children,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “Perhaps because their digestions are strong.”
“Don’t you wish that something could be substituted for it?” asked Miss. Cotton.
“There have been efforts to replace it with chicken and tongue in sandwiches,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “but I think they’ve only measurably succeeded–about as temperance drinks have in place of the real strong waters.”
Featured image. An anonymous photograph of picnickers in 1888,
See William Dean Howells. April Hopes (1887). The novel was serialized in Harper’s Magazine, which had published Winslow Homer’s picnic scenes, especially Picnic Excursion (1869)