Leonard Dakin’s family family picnics (1880s-1890)

Leonard Dakin’s family family picnics (1880s-1890)

Dakin’s photographs are a record of the family in the 1880s and early 1890s in Cherry Valley, Otsego County, New York According to Pauline Dakin Taft,the family “had a passion for picnics. There were picnics all the time at any time of day. Perhaps the lake was a...
Guy de Maupassant’s

Guy de Maupassant’s (1880)

De Maupassant knows that the picnic of this story is not the picnic you expect. Instead of grass, the setting is s a four-horse coach carrying ten passengers fleeing the Prussian army advancing on Rouen for safety at Le Havre. Instead of being congenial, all but one...
Guy De Maupassant’s “Une Partie de Campagne” (1881)

Guy De Maupassant’s “Une Partie de Campagne” (1881)

Maupassant uses the phrase une partie de campagne as a euphemism for an outdoor picnic. It’s a sad story about a romantic love that fizzles during a holiday celebrating a birthday, when the Dufours, a middle-class Parisian family, spend a day along the Seine at the...
Charles Altamont Doyle’s The Enchanted Picnic (1882)

Charles Altamont Doyle’s The Enchanted Picnic (1882)

Altamont’s The Enchanted Picnic (1882) is a sad picnic that is neither enchanted nor pleasurable. The picnicker, perhaps Doyle himself, having finished four bottles of wine and champagne, is pleasantly suffering delirium tremens. Instead of monsters, the drunk...
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Mount Royal (1882)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Mount Royal (1882)

Tintagel Castle and its Arthurian associations have perennial romantic appeal—but Mary Elizabeth Braddon is the first to fictionalize a picnic on the crag, and it’s her addition to Britain’s mythology. With lunch from a local inn, Christabel Courtnay,...
Kate Greenaway’s Moll and Jane’s Picnic (1887)

Kate Greenaway’s Moll and Jane’s Picnic (1887)

Greenaway’s primer for early readers is based on a series of adventures and activities for middle-class children with illustrations by Greenaway and text by Thomas Hartford. The story for “Moll and Jane’s Picnic” is a simple recipe for a...
William Dean Howells’ April Hopes (1887)

William Dean Howells’ April Hopes (1887)

“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...
Albert-Auguste Fourie’s The Wedding Feast at Yport (1886)

Albert-Auguste Fourie’s The Wedding Feast at Yport (1886)

Unlike Gustave Flaubert’s wedding party in Madame Bovary (a town about fifty miles east), where decorum is flouted, drunkenness prevails, Fourie’s agricultural bourgeoisie is well-mannered, and etiquette is etiquette observed. * This is an intentional contrast. Even...