After John Wilson’s August picnic on Grasmere Island, Dorothy Wordsworth was in good spirits. Uncharacteristically effusively, she wrote to her dear friend Catherine Clarkson, “Nineteen of us were to have dined there, and were all caught in a thunder shower, and all wet to the skin on our way to the lakeside.” Almost as an aside, she asked, “By the bye, what is the origin of the word picnic? Our Windermere gentlemen have a picnic everyday.” Clarkson’s replied is reply is unknown. But we can guess she was not helpful. The origin is French pique-nique, but in 1808, the etymology was fuzzy at best.
A decade later, Wordsworth’s “Excursion Up Scaw Fell Pike, October 7th, 1818” (her only published essay) describes her picnic at the Pike’s summit, England’s highest peak at 3200 feet. Though a sturdy walker, she ascended on horseback with a local guide. The day began perfectly but did not last. Fortunately, the bare rocky summit was windless, and they spread papers and ate given the mass of the mountains and the sea beyond. Dorothy carefully described its visual and spiritual stimulation, “the stillness seemed to be not of this world. We paused, and kept silence to listen, and not a sound of any kind was to be heard. We were far above the reach of cataracts of Scaw Fell; and not an insect was there to hum in the air.” An approaching storm broke the spell, and she hastened to descend.
Thomas Allom. “View from Langdale Pikes, Looking Towards Bowfell.” (1832)
Packed picnic foods might have included such local items as Cumberland sausage or ham (salty dry-cured and rubbed with brown sugar), cold Shepherd’s pie made with mutton from local Herdwick sheep, salmon, herring, char, Whillimoor Wang (hard local cheese), gingerbread, brown Gordie (barley cake), or Ricky-Nicky (a pudding made of apples dried fruits brown sugar and rum), gingerbread, damson plums or apple. Tea might have been made gypsy-style over an open fire if they had brought wood.
See Dorothy Wordsworth. “Letter to Mrs. Catherine Clarkson, August 3, 1808.” In Letters of the Wordsworth Family from 1787-1855, edited by William Knight (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1907); Dorothy Wordsworth. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, London, 1952; Dorothy Wordsworth. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. 2 ed., Edited by Mary Moorman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Featured Image: The rugged terrain of Scawfell Pike. Thomas Allom. “Scawfell Pikes from Sty Head, Cumberland.” Engraved by J.C. Bentley (1833). In Thomas Rose. Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Durham, edited by Thomas Rose (London: Fisher, Son & Company, 1832. Pike is derived from the Norse word crag,
* William Wordsworth does not use the word picnic, though he describes picnics in The Prelude (1798c.) and The Excursion (1814).