For whom a rainy day will not stop the picnic, Stoic Brits are the butt of Leech’s satiric humor.
Visually, you see a group of umbrellas in an open field lashed by rain. The legend is, “What a nice damp place we have secured; and how very fortunate we are in the weather; it would have been so provoking for us all to have brought our umbrellas and then to have had a fine day!! Glass of wine, Briggs?”
Leech’s joke alludes to another humorist Alfred Crowquill [aka Alfred Henry Forrester], whose opinion was that “Notwithstanding the proverbial variety of the climate, there is no nation under the sun so fond of Pic-Nic parties as the English; and yet how seldom are their pleasant dreams of rural repasts in the open air fated to be realized!” (1838)
* Readers looked for his cartoons first during his career at Punch (1841-1864). Leech provided a few illustrations for Charles Dickens’ anthology Pic-Nic Papers (1841), but all of the illustrations for A Christmas Carol (1843).
See Punch’s Almanack for 1851 (London, 1851)
http://books.google.com/books?id=EOVbAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=pic-nic&f=false ;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44661/44661-h/44661-h.htm#link106; Alfred Crowquill [aka Alfred Henry Forrester]. “Unpacking for a Pic-Nic” in Sketches of Seymour (1838)