May Boykin Chesnut’s  Diary from Dixie (1861)

May Boykin Chesnut’s Diary from Dixie (1861)

Coram’s View Of Mulberry in 1800 looks up to the rear of the house from the vantage point of “the street” because it was lined with slave quarters, of which houses are visible. Coram’s view suggests “the street” was a matter of...
Watkyn Williams’s  Hampstead Is the Place to Ruralise (1861)

Watkyn Williams’s Hampstead Is the Place to Ruralise (1861)

Williams’s Popular Song Hampstead Is the Place to Ruralise Hampstead Is the Place to Ruralise, All on a Summer Day (1861) is a comic hymn dedicated to the pleasures of Hampstead Heath. The euphemism “ruralizing,” like gypsying, had been in use since...
Jullien Bernard’s nonsense etymology of piquenique (1862)

Jullien Bernard’s nonsense etymology of piquenique (1862)

Bernard writes that piquenique is a corruption of the English pick an each. Something is wrong because this explanation is nonsense. Never noticed, the etymology was never corrected.  See Jullien, Bernard. Les principales étymologies de la langue française : précédées...
Augustus Egg’s in Traveling Companions  (1862)

Augustus Egg’s in Traveling Companions (1862)

Egg‘s Traveling Companions is a testimony of the ease and comfort of train travel. The two elegantly dressed women, virtually mirroring images of each other, sit without even looking out of the window at the long view of the shoreline beyond. One reads the other...
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island  (1862)

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862)

Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island was published ten years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is a story of the people who speak in the vernacular of Maine, on the road to the Kennebec, below the town of Bath. Its basis is Shakespeare’s The Tempest,...
Carl Spitzweg’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1864c.)

Carl Spitzweg’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1864c.)

Spitzweg’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe, Das Picknick, aka Luncheon on the Grass, is a happy middle-class person in the country. They sit, relaxing and enjoying each other’s company. The central figure, a portly man, toasts a woman in white, perhaps a bride. The company rises...
Karl Marx’s Hampstead Heath Picnic (1864c.)

Karl Marx’s Hampstead Heath Picnic (1864c.)

Though unfamiliar now, Hampstead Heath was once famous for its donkeys. It was a comic sight, and Gustave Doré illustrated it for London: A Pilgrimage because it was ludicrous to see fashionable picnickers straddling the donkeys. It was fun for Karl Marx, who amused...
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864)

The Doctor’s Wife is Braddon’s free adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Like Emma Bovary, Isabel Gilbert, the doctor’s unhappy wife, looks for romance. Unlike Emma, Isabel is never sexually seduced. She’s sullied but never ruined. There are...
Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1864)

Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1864)

Trollope’s beach picnic in Can You Forgive Her (1864) is highlighted with a stern warning: “Yarmouth is not a happy place for a picnic. A picnic should be held among green things. Green turf is absolutely essential. There should be, if possible, rocks, old...
Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867)

Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867)

Thérèse Raquin and her lover Laurent Le Claire murder her husband Camille at a picnic. It’s a pivotal episode, proving Zola’s contention that people acting out the “fatalities of their flesh” become brutes humaines. Everything about this picnic...
Arthur Hughes’s   A Birthday Picnic (1867)

Arthur Hughes’s A Birthday Picnic (1867)

Hughes used a picnic as a theme for a family portrait of the Pattinson family. The title he gave was A Birthday Picnic – Portraits of the children of William and Anne Pattinson of Felling, near Gateshead. A red table with food in the left background, but it is...
Émile Zola’s Madeleine Férat  (1868)

Émile Zola’s Madeleine Férat (1868)

Zola’s Madeleine Férat is dedicated to Édouard Manet. Defying the critical mainstream, Zola accepted Manet’s visual realism and his frank sensualism of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, which Zola defended against adverse criticism. Zola’s...
Carl Haag’s Luncheon at Cairn Lochan (1868)

Carl Haag’s Luncheon at Cairn Lochan (1868)

Haag’s Luncheon at Cairn Lochan shows the royal family picnicking in Scotland. Painted in 1868, Haag based the scene on an episode in 1861, three months before Prince Albert’s death. Yet, Haag shows the Queen dressed in her habitual black. She is accompanied by Albert...
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868)

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868)

“Sunshine and laughter are good omens for a pleasure party,”  Alcott writes in Little Women. And when Laurie writes to Jo to explain his intentions, he promises sunshine and laughter. Dear Jo, What ho! Some English girls and boys are coming to see me...