For whom a rainy day will not stop the picnic, Stoic Brits are the butt of Leech’s satiric humor. Visually, you see a group of umbrellas in an open field lashed by rain. The legend is, “What a nice damp place we have secured; and how very fortunate we are...
When Charles Dickens visited the Looking Glass Prairie in 1842, it reminded him of a Catlin exhibition in London. “The sun was going down, very red and bright,” Dickens writes, “and the prospect looked like that ruddy sketch of Catlin’s, which...
Thompson’s painting has often been retitled. It has been Pic Nick, A Pic Nick, Camden, Maine], and is currently A Pic Nick in the Woods of New England. The menu included ham [with cloves], roast chicken, clams, potatoes or baked beans? [in a dish], bread, wine,...
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is attack on the French bourgeoisie’s crudities and lack of taste. A pivotal moment occurs at Emma Rouault’s wedding party, a vaguely picnicky outdoor event. The party foreshadows Emma’s disastrous relationship with...
Beeton’s picnic entry appears almost as an afterthought in the last chapter of Household Management. As with other formal dinner suggestions, the picnic is not a casual affair but a staged “dinner held in the “rough.” Where Beeton situates...
Unlike Sam Weller’s “weal pies,” Mrs. Beeton’s includes a recipe for a proper veal pie.* Veal Pie Ingredients.—2 lbs. of veal cutlets, 1 or 2 slices of lean bacon or ham, pepper and salt to taste, 2 tablespoonfuls of minced savoury herbs, 2...
Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island was published ten years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is a story of the people who speak in the vernacular of Maine, on the road to the Kennebec, below the town of Bath. Its basis is Shakespeare’s The Tempest,...
Gardener’s A Pic-Nic Party is set in a skiff on the shore of Antietam Creek. He thought it was an apt allusion to the cliché “War is not a Picnic,” but when published, no one noticed. It dropped from sight, lost in more dramatic images in...
Spitzweg’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe, Das Picknick, aka Luncheon on the Grass, is a happy middle-class person in the country. They sit, relaxing and enjoying each other’s company. The central figure, a portly man, toasts a woman in white, perhaps a bride. The company rises...
Though unfamiliar now, Hampstead Heath was once famous for its donkeys. It was a comic sight, and Gustave Doré illustrated it for London: A Pilgrimage because it was ludicrous to see fashionable picnickers straddling the donkeys. It was fun for Karl Marx, who amused...
