Gillray’s Blowing up the Pic Nics; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime (April 2, 1802) is an important reason picnic entered English common parlance. Before Gillray, pique-nique was a trendy French word known to English Francophiles as pique-nique. But when Gillray lampooned the Pic Nic Society, all of London knew the word, but not necessarily what pic nic denoted. In addition to Blowing up the Pic Nic’s; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime (April 2, 1802), The Pic Nic Orchestra (1802), and Dilettanti; or-a-Peep at the Green Room. Vide Pic Nic Orgies (February 1803). The last appeared shortly after the society disbanded.
For those au currants, the Pic Nics were a posh social club, exclusive and expensive. According to pique-nique-style dining, members were required to subscribe to dinner and contribute food, drinks, and money. Some performed in amateur theatricals, but many more gambled late into the night and early hours of the morning. Thomas Rowlandson sketched the faro table elsewhere discussed in PicnicWit.
The scandal erupted when William Brinsley Sheridan, owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, attacked the Pic Nics, accusing them of stealing his patrons and theatergoers. The Pic Nics answered by publishing the journal Pic Nic, with which they attempted to establish their bona fide status. Everyone associated was savaged when James Gillray picked up Sheridan’s complaints, especially in Blowing Up the Pic Nic’s. The scandal briefly rocked London society. The Pic Nics suffered acute embarrassment and disbanded in early 1803.
Gillray scants the Pic Nic’s elaborate commitment to food and drinks, except to show the food and wine spilling from the table (on the stage right) as a gang of actors, led by the portly William Brinsley Sheridan, in torn harlequin costume, storms into the theater.
Featured Image: Dressed as Harlequin Quixote, Sheridan attacks such Pic Nics. Blowing up the Pic Nics; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime (April 2, 1802), engraving on paper. Hannah Humphrey: London 1802
See Joseph Grego, ed. The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist: With the Story of His Life and Times. London: Chatto & Windus, 1873.