Gilles Ménage was the first to define piquenique in his Dictionnaire de Étymologique de la Langue Françoise, published in Paris in 1694. Forty-four years earlier, when he published his Les Origines de la Langue Françoise, piquenique, then newly coined in 1649, was an...
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, is the second person to use picnic in English and spell it in a modern way. His son Philip, living in Leipzig, wrote that he attended a picnic gathering at Madame Valentin’s salon, but this 1748 letter is lost. Chesterfield...
Samuel Foote’s play The Nabob, first produced in 1772, now obscure, is the first mention of the compound word “nick-nack.” Foote used it in the sense of dining en piquenique, which suggests familiarity with the Parisian dining custom. The...
Georgina Battiscombe’s 1949 English Picnics is a study of English picnics in literature and art that has become a go-to standard because it was the first of its kind. Her writing is distinctive, authoritative voice and her examples and explanations usually first-rate....
The Pic Nic Society attracted obsessive gamblers, eager amateur actors called Dilettanti, and gourmand diners. Taking advantage of a truce in a decade-long war with France (led by Napoleon, then First Consul), the Pic Nics wagered (and lost) that London might have a...
Gillray’s Blowing up the Pic Nics; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime (April 2, 1802) is an important reason picnic entered English common parlance. Before Gillray, pique-nique was a trendy French word known to...
Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic appeared in 1809, six years after Harris’s The Happy Courtship, Nic. It is now remembered, if at all, as the second published reference to a picnic in English. However, following the French custom of indoor dining, the...
Corny picnic satire was in vogue among English music before Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1871 Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. Typical “The Pic-Nic” is sung to the air of “Here’s the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen” from Sheridan’s The...
Rousseau and Abbé Etienne Condillac dined en piquenique sometime in 1745 or 1747. The date is uncertain because Rousseau is careless with dates related to the incident twenty years after in Confessions. Hard up and living in Paris in the rue Saint-Denis, Rousseau...
Being Anglophile and aware of London happenings, Irving probably picked up the aftermath of the Pic Nic Society scandal during his tour of Europe 1804-1806. The word stuck, but it’s used only once as an adjective to mean something silly. Under the heading “Fashions by...
