Seymour’s picnics sketches show a keen awareness of their potential for humor and satire. Especially if they’ve gone wrong. Unpacking for a Pic-Nic, for example, pokes fun at what breaks in a basket, as the legend makes amply clear, “Oh! Dear, here’s the sherry and mix’d pickles broke!” O, yes, and they have broke into the pastry too.”
For an edition of Seymour’s sketches, Alfred Crowquill, the pseudonym of Alfred Henry Forrester, added narrative and doggerel verse. For those not entirely familiar with picnicking, Crowquill added a food and drink menu and a list of the necessary gear:
Notwithstanding the proverbial variety of the climate, there is no nation under the sun so fond of Pic-Nic parties as the English; and yet how seldom are their pleasant dreams of rural repasts in the open air fated to be realized!
However snugly they may pack the materials for the feast, the pack generally gets shuffled in the carriage, and consequently their promised pleasure proves anything but “without mixture without measure.”
The jam-tarts are brought to light, and are found to have got a little jam too much. The bottles are cracked before their time, and the liberal supplies of pale sherry and old port are turned into a-little current.
They turn out their jar of gherkins, and find them mixed, and all their store in a sad pickle.
The leg of mutton is the only thing that has stood in the general melee.
The plates are all dished, and the dishes only fit for a lunatic asylum, being all literally cracked.
Even the knives and forks are found to ride rusty on the occasion. The bread is become sop; and they have not even the satisfaction of getting salt to their porridge, for that is dissolved into briny tears.
Like the provisions, they find themselves uncomfortably hamper’d; for they generally chuse such a very retired spot, that there is nothing to be had for love or money in the neighbourhood, for all the shops are as distant as-ninety-ninth cousins!
However delightful the scenery may be, it is counterbalanced by the prospect of starvation.
Although on the borders of a stream abounding in fish, they have neither hook nor line; and even the young gentlemen who sing fail in a catch for want of the necessary bait. Their spirits are naturally damped by their disappointment, and their holiday garments by a summer shower; and though the ducks of the gentlemen take the water as favourably as possible, every white muslin presently assumes the appearance of a drab, and, becoming a little limp and dirty, looks as miserable as a lame beggar!
In fine, it is only a donkey or a goose that can reasonably expect to obtain a comfortable feed in a field. It may be very poetical to talk of “Nature’s table-cloth of emerald verdure;” but depend on it, a damask one, spread over that full-grown vegetable-a mahogany table-is far preferable.
See The Sketches of Seymour—Complete (1834/36) (London: Thomas Fry, 1838 or later). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5650/5650-h/5650-h.htm. This edition is based on a collection of Seymour’s works to which Alfred Crowquill, the pseudonym of Alfred Henry Forrester, added narrative and doggerel verse. Seymour wrote legends for each illustration, but Crowquill greatly expanded Seymour’s intentions.