Seymour’s picnics are comic as in Unpacking for a Pic-Nic and “—A merry holiday party, forming a tolerable boat-load, and well provided with baskets of provisions, were rowing along the beautiful and picturesque banks that fringe the river’s side...
At the center of Corot’s View Near Naples is a summery rustic picnic in a grassy field above the Bay of Naples. Two couples have come for a holiday to eat, drink, sing, and dance. Despite the title’s location, the landscape is imaginary but based on...
“A Jaunt to the Looking-Glass Prairie and Back” left Dickens with mixed feelings. The weather was hot and the journey tedious, but the picnic on Looking-Glass Prairie” was something Dickens wanted, mostly because he had been told that any sightseer...
The battlefield déjeuner sur l’herbe in The Three Musketeers set a pattern for sardonic picnic humor. * Dumas and Auguste Maquet (his co-author) add comic relief to the severe Siege of La Rochelle when during a lull in the battle, Athos makes a bet that he,...
Cole’s Pic-Nic Party is a standout for its joie de vivre. It’s not just another of Cole’s numerous “sylvan” scenes,” which his hyperbolic biographer Louis Noble described as being “all American, wide, bright polished water,...
The London Stock Exchange’s reaction to a current financial panic is the butt of John Leech’s “The Currency Question, or The Exchange Out for a Day.” Leech implies picnicking in troubled times is laughable when buying and selling stocks is as...
Knowing that any picnic might dissolve in chaos when attacked by a flying critter, readers of Punch, Britain’s premier satirical magazine, laughed at Leech’s mock tragedy. They might have also smiled patronizingly at the verbal pun “wopps,” the Cockney pronunciation...
Dumas, fils’s La Dame aux Camélias does not have a picnic episode. But Roy C. Smallwood’s Camille makes a lover’s picnic a set piece.
Sometime in 1798-1799, the date is unclear; Woodsworth describes a picnic in The Prelude. He does not refer to this adventure as a picnic because the word was unknown to him at this time. He probably became familiar with the word a decade later because John Wilson...
“Blissful” is Dickens’s word to describe Copperfield’s tenderest memories of Dora Spenlow’s picnic birthday party. He’s about nineteen and obsessed, getting up before 6 AM to buy flowers, so they are fresh. The picnic is near...
