The Doctor’s Wife is Braddon’s free adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Like Emma Bovary, Isabel Gilbert, the doctor’s unhappy wife, looks for romance. Unlike Emma, Isabel is never sexually seduced. She’s sullied but never ruined. There are...
Trollope’s beach picnic in Can You Forgive Her (1864) is highlighted with a stern warning: “Yarmouth is not a happy place for a picnic. A picnic should be held among green things. Green turf is absolutely essential. There should be, if possible, rocks, old...
Monet responded to Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe his painting in 1865 but left it uncompleted. Unlike Manet, who painted in the studio, Monet painted outdoors. This presented logistical problems because his picnic was to be monumental, approximately 15 x 20...
Dickens vented his distaste for English travel food, especially sandwiches served in cold, comfortless train stations. The Boy at Mugby Station working in h Refreshment Room gleefully tells anyone who will listen (or not) how awful the refreshments (if they can be...
When Appleton’s Journal commissioned Winslow Homer to illustrate a short essay, “Picnic Excursions,” it’s unclear if he ever read the text, partly because he titled his composition The Picnic Excursion. Perhaps he considered that picnics are...
According to Jerrold’s satire “Picnic Reform,” British “Picnic- frequenters” must radically alter their “picnic gastronomy.” Change is accomplished by eliminating the ordinary. “Could anything be more barbarous?”...
James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s La Partie carrée, aka The Foursome, is more sexually suggestive than the English title indicates. The French title Partie Carrée suggests a sexual tryst and alludes to Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863)....
Corny picnic satire was long in vogue in English music before Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, premiered in 1871. [Posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.Com] “The Pic-Nic,” an 1829 song (sung to the air of “Here’s the Maiden...
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis or the Gods Grown Old is an early collaboration and not one of their best. It’s a topsy-turvy derivative version of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld or Orphée aux envers. Instead of comedy in the...
For London: A Pilgrimage, Doré and Jerrold visited Epsom in 1869 to experience the tumult of Derby-Day— the race, the carnival atmosphere, and picnic luncheons on carriage tops. Unlike William Powell Frith’s The Derby Day, Dore and Jerrold were keen to exploit...
