Among Suetonius’ apocryphal stories in The Lives of the Caesars (121c. CE) is Emperor Caligula’s three-mile bridge across the Bay of Naples from Baiae to Puteoli. It’s the kind of folly you associate with Caligula in one of his less savage moods, and...
Sandwiches in the United States are mentioned first by Frances Trollope in Domestic Manners of the Americans. Their contents are unknown, and they were brought along for a hellish “pic-nic” party in the woods in the environs of Cincinnati circa 1829....
Bouquet’s Le repas de Pierrot, Pierrot’s Dinner, suggests a picnic. The scene depicts the actor Jean-Gaspard Deburau as Pierrot, a star stock character in the Théâtre des Funambules (Theater of the Tightrope Walkers). Pierrot always losses. From the look...
Robert Seymour’s “O lawkes, there’s that nasty cow walking all over our dinner!” (1834-36) Seymour was an illustrator, and cartoonist noted for his wit and humor. For his sketches, as opposed to a political or social cartoons. His preference is...
Seymour’s picnics sketches show a keen awareness of their potential for humor and satire. Especially if they’ve gone wrong. Unpacking for a Pic-Nic, for example, pokes fun at what breaks in a basket, as the legend makes amply clear, “Oh! Dear,...
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...
“A Pleasant Day With An Unpleasant Termination” is Dickens’s comic send-up of the Halt on the Hunt, particularly Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (1825). Much of the comedy...
Miller’s in Breakfast at Sunrise looks picnicky, but it’s how adventurers and hunters dined in the wild. As a camp artist for Capt. William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish adventurer, Miller The hunters’ usual mess was served on a waterproof India...
Bartlett was a British landscape artist known for his views appearing in picturesque travel volumes, including American Scenery: or Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. Each of the topographical landscape views was accompanied by Nathaniel P....
It’s one of Tennyson’s most popular shorter poems and is so sincere that readers believe Audley Court is a real place and search for it in the environs of Cambridge. The opening lines are among Tennyson’s most remembered. The Bull, the Fleece are...
