Among the Pic Nic Society anecdotes is its sponsorship of a balloon launch. In London. In July 1802, the Pic Nics called an ad hoc meeting to watch and cheer Jacques Garnerin’s successful launch of a hot air balloon from Ranelagh Gardens. See: Universal Magazine of...
Rowlandson’s Hunt the Slipper, Pic-Nic Revels satirizes the Pic-Nics, a society of Dilettanti (amateur actors), gamblers, and gourmands who briefly flourished 1802-3. The rules of the Society are framed on the wall: Ici on boit, on danse, on rit! Et quelquefois on...
Rowlandson’s Richmond Bridge, Surrey documents a picnic party at low tide on the Thames’s sandy shore opposite Hampton Court. It was common for Londoners to hire a water taxi to transport picnicker out of the city and into the country for an afternoon of eating and...
Williams’s Peep into Tottenham Street, or Dilettanti Performers in Training is a knockoff of Gillray’s caricature Dilettanti Theatrical;-or-a Peep at the Green Room. Vide Pic-Nic Orgies (Tottenham Street was the location of the rooms the Pic Nics rented for their...
From 1780-1820, “Dilettanti,” or amateur theater aficionados, organized theater groups. Among the most passionate, Louise Craven, Margravine of Ansbach, who wrote plays, produced and acted in them, persuaded her doting husband, the Margrave of Ansbach, to...
Stuart’s firsthand memories of the time that parallel Henry Angelo’s playful attitude towards the Pic Nic society. She attempts a comic attitude, that really masks her antagonism. “Its partisans, “she wrote in her journal, “might have been pursued to the stake or...
Gillray’s caricature Dilettanti Theatrical; or a Peep at the Green Room. Vide Pic-Nic Orgies lampoons the Pic Nic Society. For a brief time, the Pic Nics were one of Gillray’s prime targets, and his satire Blowing up the Pic Nics helped to hound the society into...
Fricassee is picnic food when dining indoors. It’s mentioned in Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) and Mary Belson Elliott’s The Mice and Their Pic Nic (1809). Had Elliott needed a recipe, she might have found it in Mrs. Rundell’s A New System of...
Elliott’s moral tale The Mice and Their Pic Nic failed to persuade readers that a “pic nic dinner,” especially in London, is sinful. Elliott’s readers were expected to recognize her mouse story as an adaptation of Aesop’s fable...
Emma insults Miss Bates. But she outdoes herself in Sense and Sensibility, in which she deflates her characters’ high expectations by abruptly canceling the picnic. The “party of pleasure,” Austen’s euphemism for a picnic, was intended at...
Wordsworth’s lines reveal the sudden beauty a picnicker might encounter, which triggers pleasure and spiritual ease at an evening picnic: Ah! That such beauty, varying in the light Of living nature, cannot be portrayed By words, nor by...
Austen’s Emma has two picnic episodes, one of which never happens * and the other a proper picnic at Box Hill. During strawberry season, Emma Woodhouse and her crowd gather in Knightley’s Donwell Abbey garden. Mrs. Elston’s enthusiastic plan for a...
Thomas Stothard’s San Souci is a picnic in the style of the fête galante associated with Jean-Antoine Watteau. Couples dressed in 17th-century clothing enjoy their leisure in varying poses of elegant courting. The foreground includes a picnic cloth with food and...
Keats uses the phrase “pic nic scandal” to suggest something silly, and he tosses it off as if it’s a common phrase, but it’s unique to him. Writing to his brother George and his wife Georgiana, he writes, “Perhaps as you were fond of...
” “The most desolate place in the world” where Mary Shelley thought she was overlooking the Mer de Glace, Sea of Ice, grinding into the Chamonix valley. Her descriptive phrase suggests that she and her traveling companions, Percy Shelley (her lover)...
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...
When Gypsying was exhibited at the Royal Academy, a reviewer carped that Leslie’s Londoners are insensitive Cockneys (a derogatory term) unable to appreciate the country. Presumably, only the upper classes know how to do it right. When Leslie used the term as a...
Five years into his six-year exile on St. Helena, Napoleon was pale, tired-looking, and fat, though his face showed no fatigue or illness. Still, after a ten-mile journey on horseback (on hilly terrain), he uncharacteristically stopped for a social visit at Mount...
Writing in 1804, Longchamps suggests that sharing the bill at dinner, dîner en manière de pique-nique was stylish in the 1740s. Perhaps, but it was an old memory, and by then, dining en pique-nique was common. Longchamps explains that while in the employ of Emilie du...
De Kock sometimes styled the French Dickens, is known for his broad portrayals of the Parisian working-class society, affairs, cabarets, and other entertainment. In Monsieur Dupont, the entertainment spotlighted is a tumultuous picnic at Romainville, still a popular...
