From 1780-1820, “Dilettanti,” or amateur theater aficionados, organized theater groups. Among the most passionate, Louise Craven, Margravine of Ansbach, who wrote plays, produced and acted in them, persuaded her doting husband, the Margrave of Ansbach, to...
Gillray’s caricature Dilettanti Theatrical; or a Peep at the Green Room. Vide Pic-Nic Orgies lampoons the Pic Nic Society. For a brief time, the Pic Nics were one of Gillray’s prime targets, and his satire Blowing up the Pic Nics helped to hound the society into...
Fricassee is picnic food when dining indoors. It’s mentioned in Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) and Mary Belson Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic Nic (1809). Had Elliott needed a recipe, she might have found it in Mrs. Rundell’s A New System of...
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...
Wordsworth’s lines reveal the sudden beauty a picnicker might encounter, which triggers pleasure and spiritual ease at an evening picnic: Ah! That such beauty, varying in the light Of living nature, cannot be portrayed By words, nor by...
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...
Thomas Stothard’s San Souci is a picnic in the style of the fête galante associated with Jean-Antoine Watteau. Couples dressed in 17th-century clothing enjoy their leisure in varying poses of elegant courting. The foreground includes a picnic cloth with food and...
Keats uses the phrase “pic nic scandal” to suggest something silly, and he tosses it off as if it’s a common phrase, but it’s unique to him. Writing to his brother George and his wife Georgiana, he writes, “Perhaps as you were fond of...
” “The most desolate place in the world” where Mary Shelley thought she was overlooking the Mer de Glace, Sea of Ice, grinding into the Chamonix valley. Her descriptive phrase suggests that she and her traveling companions, Percy Shelley (her lover)...
