Proust’s Within a Budding Grove [aka In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] is sometimes remembered for young Marcel’s picnics on the bluffs at Balbec, a fictional town in Normandy. (Proust does not use pique-nique because this is an outdoor meal.) With a...
Rousseau was not thinking of a pique-nique when he wrote, “The turf will be our chairs and table, the banks of the stream our side-board, and our dessert is hanging on the trees.” He knew that pique-nique was an indoor meal for which friends shared the...
Goldsmith does not use the word picnic, but two such episodes in The Vicar of Wakefield exist. They are so obvious that in English Picnics, Georgina Battiscombe credits with the first “picnics” in English literature. If only he had used the word! Goldsmith...
It resembles a picnic; it’s recreational, but it’s lunch on a trout-fishing excursion on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Ernest Hemingway’s story “Big Two-Hearted River, Part Two,” Nick Adams breaks to have a sandwich. Nick is...
Elliott’s moral tale The Mice and Their Pic Nic failed to persuade readers that a “pic nic dinner,” especially in London, is sinful. Elliott’s readers were expected to recognize her mouse story as an adaptation of Aesop’s fable...
Emma insults Miss Bates. But she outdoes herself in Sense and Sensibility, in which she deflates her characters’ high expectations by abruptly canceling the picnic. The “party of pleasure,” Austen’s euphemism for a picnic, was intended at...
Austen’s Emma has two picnic episodes, one of which never happens * and the other a proper picnic at Box Hill. During strawberry season, Emma Woodhouse and her crowd gather in Knightley’s Donwell Abbey garden. Mrs. Elston’s enthusiastic plan for a...
De Kock sometimes styled the French Dickens, is known for his broad portrayals of the Parisian working-class society, affairs, cabarets, and other entertainment. In Monsieur Dupont, the entertainment spotlighted is a tumultuous picnic at Romainville, still a popular...
Grahame’s picnic in The Wind in the Willows (1908) is a wonder. What child (or adult) could ever conceive of a picnic for one eating basket full of “cold chicken. ....
Dickens does not use the word picnic. But when the Wardles have lunch in their barouche, it’s an unmistakably a picnic: “In an open barouche, the horses of which had been taken out, the better to accommodate it to the crowded place, stood a stout old...
