Henry Angelo’s Reminiscences (1830)

Henry Angelo’s Reminiscences (1830)

Angelo, London’s most renowned fencing master, was an original Pic Nic. His in Reminiscences of Henry Angelo (1830) is among the few first-hand depictions of the society. Angel explains that “the plan [for the Pic Nics] was derived from a friendly custom...
Ward McAllister’s Society As I Have Found It (1890)

Ward McAllister’s Society As I Have Found It (1890)

McCallister was a member of the Establishment and a paid social advisor, especially to Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, the acknowledged queen of New York society. The text’s epigram is: “One who reads this book through will have as rough a mental journey as...
M.F.K. Fisher’s “The First Oyster” (1941)

M.F.K. Fisher’s “The First Oyster” (1941)

Buried in Gastronomical Me and the story Fisher’s first oyster is her memory of a joyous school picnic at the Huntington School for Girls. Fisher remembers t “Hungry shrieking,” girls “at half past noon a procession of house-boys would come...
Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy’s Wellfleet Picnic (1942)

Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy’s Wellfleet Picnic (1942)

McCarthy and  Wilson enjoyed sex and picnics in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They often picnicked at the freshwater ponds dotting the mid-Cape, but during the summer of 1942, their marriage was wobbly. Wilson was fond of remembering his sexual relations with McCarthy....
Robert Norton’s Memories of Edith Wharton Picnicking (1947c)

Robert Norton’s Memories of Edith Wharton Picnicking (1947c)

Norton recalls Edith Wharton “had a passion for picnics, a passion not shared by quite all of her guests, some of whom, unskilled at balancing a loaded plate on their knees, would have secretly preferred a hot square meal served on solid mahogany: but they dared not...
Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece  (1952)

Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece (1952)

“Heroic Survivors of the Picnic.” is Gwen Raverat’s bittersweet memory of a miserable picnic. It’s the next-to-last anecdote in her memoir Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. I think she means to suggest that life was no picnic but that she...
Felice Benuzzi No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1952)

Felice Benuzzi No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1952)

Benuzzi’s original title for his memoir was Fuga sul Kenya – 17 giorni di liberta [Escape on Kenya – 17 days of liberty]. But being deeply impressed by Vivienne de Watteville’s Speak to the Earth, her memoir of camping on Mount Kenya, * he renamed the...
Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1959)

Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1959)

Among Lee’s vivid memories is a picnic by the sea, a grand event sponsored by the Slad church choir. It was a trek of fifty-one miles to Weston-Super-Mare that most of the townsfolk stuffed themselves into hired five charabancs [SHarəˌbaNG, -ˌbaNGk]. Lined up,...