For London: A Pilgrimage, Doré and Jerrold visited Epsom in 1869 to experience the tumult of Derby-Day— the race, the carnival atmosphere, and picnic luncheons on carriage tops. Unlike William Powell Frith’s The Derby Day, Dore and Jerrold were keen to exploit the totality of the day: the crowd’s excitement and turmoil and the race’s tension and thrill. William Frith never gets beyond the crowds that have come to be seen rather than see the race. *
Doré’s illustrations and Jerrold’s text describe the perpetual tumult for the days before the race, which most never see because they are embedded in a seething mass of people on the great lawn beyond the track.
Jerrold writes, “On the Downs, London is in the highest spirits, and all classes are intermingled for a few hours on the happiest terms. Strolling amid the booths and tents, we find elbowing each other, bantering, playing, drinking, eating, and smoking, shoals of shopboys and clerks, tradesmen in fast attire, mechanics in holiday dress, wondering foreigners.”
The Derby lunch illustrates the moment when the tumult momentarily subsides, and the action is transferred to carriage tops, where enthusiasts sit for a picnic. Blanchard skips describing the scene, but Henry James does not. Stunned by its vulgarity, James’s “The Derby Stakes” describes his shock when he watched the profusion of picnickers on the carriage tops and considered the crowd gone mad: “The crowd was very animated; that is the most succinct description I can give of it. The horses of course had been removed from the vehicles, so that the pedestrians were free to surge against the wheels and even to a certain extent to scale and overrun the carriages. This tendency became most pronounced when, as the mid-period of the day was reached, the process of lunching began to unfold itself and every coach-top to become the scene of a picnic. *
Featured Image: Doré’s The Derby at Lunch is a picnic orgy.
See Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold. London: A Pilgrimage (1872; http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10470488/f15.image.r=.langEN; Gustave Doré. “The Derby: At Lunch.” (1872), Wood engraving. In Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold. London: A Pilgrimage. London; http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10470488/f15.image.r=.langEN. Also, separate discussion of William Powell Frith’s The Derby Day and Henry James’s day at Epsom.