The Haunted Palace Blog

A British favourite

While the summer of 2024 has been distinctly dismal across Britain, in the brief intervals when the sun shines, many people will be hoping to pack up their picnic baskets and head out for a bit of cheeky al fresco dining in some picturesque location. What could be more quintessentially British than spreading out your tartan rug, cracking open your picnic hamper and feasting on some slightly curled up sandwiches along with a nice flask of tea (or something stronger), all while fending off those annoying wasps?

But it was not always this way. Far from being a traditional British pastime, the word picnic or Pique Nique entered the English language from the French, where the word had quite different connotations to what we know today.

Alfresco dining before the picnic

Most people today associate the picnic with alfresco dining outdoors, and while the French may have invented the word, they certainly did not invent the concept. Clearly people in all cultures, times, and countries had figured out that eating al fresco was convenient and at times, even pleasurable.

However, it was usually associated with rusticity (and not in a good way).  Rural labourers routinely ate their food in the fields in which they toiled. Travellers often had no choice but to eat outdoors. And while in Medieval Europe, hunting parties would often take a break from the chase to enjoy a luxury snack and a few gallons of ale in an outdoor setting, this was still primarily a rural pastime.

What the French did, was introduce the word Pique Nique to urban elites as a stylish and exclusive form of communal dining, which, importantly, included entertainment.

It’s a picnic Jim, but not as we know it

The French word was originally spelled Pique Nique. Nobody is quite sure exactly what its origins were, but the word first appeared in print in a political satire from 1649, Les Charmans effects des barricades, ou l’amité durable de la compagnie des freres Bachiques de Pique-Nique. The play was written during the Fronde civil war in France (1648-1653) a war that also coincided with the Franco-Spanish War, both of which led to food shortages and starvation in France. In the play, a character called Pique Nique, illustrates the hypocrisy of the Frondists, fighting at the blockades by day and gorging on food every night, while the poor, unable to get food because of the blockades, starved.¹ Not a very auspicious origin for a word linked to such an innocent pleasure, however, judging by what The Pic Nic Society later got up to, there might be some foreshadowing here.

Times and fashions change though, and the word soon entered the public imagination in a more positive light. By 1694, it was listed in Gilles Ménage’s Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue Françoise, where it was described as a rather fashionable and luxurious form of communal dining. ²

The practice was favoured amongst elegant Parisienne society, the Beau Monde, and was in some ways an egalitarian event. There was no specific host organising the food and fun, instead everyone would bring a contribution to the gathering, or, if they were dining in one of the newly fashionable restaurants springing up in Paris, they would split the bill.³

The biggest difference with early Pique Nique dining and modern ideas of the Picnic, is that these meals were invariably held indoors. They were also about as far away from a few egg sandwiches and a flask of tea as you can get. The Beau Monde in eighteenth century France, were not known for their simple rustic tastes (well, not until Marie Antoinette made it fashionable at her Petite Hameau, but that didn’t go so well for her in the end). Meals en Pique Nique were extravagant, luxurious, and more than that, they were fashionable.

The end of the party

Once the French Revolution began, aristocratic excess was not just unfashionable, it was downright dangerous. Many members of the French Beau Monde were forced to flee their lives of privilege in order to escape their inevitable appointment with Madame Guillotine. Many fled to nearby England, which must have been a mixed blessing, as England and France were about to enter into a decade long war triggered by the Revolution, leading to all things French being viewed with suspicion.

There would be a short respite before the Napoleonic Wars began in 1803, kick starting another decade or so of European conflict. It was in between this war sandwich that the Pic Nic Society slipped itself, like a thick slice of cheese.

All this political upheaval meant that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, London was home to a fairly sizeable community of French émigrés. Low on funds and kicking their heels, they were looking to recapture some of the lost glamour of the ancien régime.

It was these émigrés who introduced the concept of the pique nique to British High Society. After all, what better way for impoverished émigrés to continue the highlife, than by setting a trend for big extravagant parties where no one person had to foot the bill.  And so, the idea of the Pic Nic exploded onto the scene in London.

Founder members

In 1801, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Francis Greville, the son of renowned MP Fulke Greville, and a veteran of the American War of Independence, as well as an all-round theatrical type, hosted a potluck supper for his friends. The event included one of his favourite pastimes of amateur dramatics. The combination of dining and entertainment was such a success that in 1802, he decided to monetize it. Influenced by French émigrés, he adopted their word and set up The Pic Nic Society. A subscription society with hired rooms in Tottenham Street as their base.^4,5

As well as many French émigrés, notable British members included the famously rotund Countess of Buckinghamshire, the Countess of Salisbury (who met her unfortunate end at the grand old age of eighty-five, when her hat caught fire), the notorious rake, Lord Cholmondeley, and the pocket-sized Lord Mount Edgcumbe. Even the boozy Prince of Wales became a frequent attendee, enthusiastically gambling vast sums at the infamous faro tables hosted by the society. ⁶

This plucky band of two hundred or so plutocrats and exiles, were boldly swimming against the tide of anti-French feeling, running an exclusive subscription society, dedicated to excess, and based on all things French. What could possibly go wrong?

The Pic Nic Society

Perhaps because of tense relations with the French across the channel, or perhaps because of the antics of the Pic Nic Society themselves, they courted controversy almost immediately.

The Society was self-consciously elite, charging an exorbitant £6 subscription fee to keep out the riff raff. This also ensured that the wider audience of the aspiring middle classes were priced out. The National Archives Currency Converter says that in 1800 £6 equated to around £265 purchasing power as of 2017, but some sources put the true equivalent at as much as £750).⁷ Later newspaper articles listed subscriptions for a gentleman as costing £9.9 shillings and for ladies, seven guineas. ⁸ The Pic Nic Society was intent on preserving its exclusivity.

This was further reinforced by the strict and potentially expensive requirements of membership. Each member was obliged to bring a food contribution decided on by lot, along with six bottles of wine. While splitting the bill was in keeping with the clubbable nature of British society at the time, the method of using a lottery could be a double-edged sword. The memoirs of Henry Angelo, a renowned Fencing Master, Man about Town, and Pic Nic member, recalled that you might be lucky and be asked to provide something fairly cheap, like oranges, but equally, you could end up having to provide some gourmet cuisine that would cost a small fortune. ⁹

It might seem that the Pic Nic Society offering was the same as countless London clubs, or ever-popular subscription balls. And in part you would be right. Where the Pic Nic Society differed, was in that it offered after dinner entertainment. Members could expect fine dining, good wine (a lot of good wine), amateur theatrics, before the evening was rounded off with some serious gambling (which, in truth, was what many members were really there for).

Scandal

The Pic Nic Society was so consciously ‘fashionable’ that it ruffled feathers almost immediately, but it was not just its exclusivity that rankled with many people.

Firstly, like the Pique Nique in the seventeenth century, members ate and drank excessively, vying to out-do each other with their contributions. However, the London Pic Nic events were distinctly rowdy and rambunctious affairs, unlike their French equivalent.^10,11

Then there was the issue of the gambling. Faro, a fast moving, high stakes game that was easy to learn, was popular amongst Pic Nickers. This brought the society into conflict with moralists, who blamed excessive gambling for ruining many respectable families.

Added to this, the backdrop to all this unbridled privilege and excess, was a Europe seething with revolutionary sentiment, creating a fear that this fervour would seep into English society, especially when the poor at home struggled to put food on the table. As if that wasn’t enough, London was also suffering from a cholera epidemic. A group of wealthy Londoners getting sloshed, and partying into the small hours was at best tone deaf at worst utterly callous.

But what really ensure that the Pic Nic Society would not last long, was its perceived impact on theatre revenues. This led to a feud with the influential, and deeply unpleasant, theatre impresario and playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Author of the Rivals, and a successful theatre manager, Sheridan was also infamous for his habit of repeatedly cheating on his wife and stalking and assaulting women who refused his advances. _¹²

Sheridan stoked up fears that Drury Lane theatres would lose money in the face of the amateur dramatics offered by the Pic Nics, he also stoked moral panic at their antics, even if the idea of Sheridan occupying the moral high ground, was a bit rich. Media savvy, he began a highly effective campaign against the Society in the press. This war against the Pic Nics was satirised by the cartoonist James Gillray, in his 1802 print, blowing up the Pic Nic’s; – or – Harlequin Quixote attacking the Puppets. Sheridan dressed in Harlequin’s motley leads a band of disgruntled actors to disrupt the Pic Nics at their supper.

The society’s fate was sealed, it could not survive such an onslaught and the attendant public odium. By 1803, it was struggling to raise subscriptions and the first Pic Nic Society in Britain closed its doors. (Although, rather gamely, Greville carried on organizing events and getting into trouble until his death in 1816). ^13,14

But the Pic Nic was not dead. In fact, the story of the picnic was only just beginning.

The Romantic picnic

As the ancien régime and Enlightenment rationalism faded into the past, a new artistic movement captured the popular imagination: The Romantics. This movement brought with it a love of the great outdoors and wild places. Travel for pleasure was still prohibitively expensive, but this new fashion for sightseeing brought more and more of the middle classes out into the British countryside, and they brought their packed lunches.  Thanks to the middle classes, the picnic soon became synonymous with genteel outdoor dining.

Middle class romantic poet William Wordsworth extolled this new form of picnic in his 1799 poem The Prelude:

Hence rustic dinners on the cool green ground,

Or in the woods, or by a riverside

Or fountain—festive banquets that provoked

The languid action of a natural scene

By pleasure of corporeal appetite

There is also the famously cringey picnic scene in Jane Austen’s novel Emma, where the eponymous heroine embarrasses Miss Bates during an outing to Box Hill.

As the Victorian age advanced, so too did the popularity of the picnic. Even Mrs Beeton got in on the act (although her version of the picnic was more like a banquet). ¹⁵ Victorian picnics were still mainly the preserve of the middle and upper classes, often becoming the highlight of the social season. Extravagant picnics, prepared by an army of servants were common at events such as The Epsom Derby and the Henley Regatta. Eventually, cottoning on to a lucrative market, retailers like Fortnum and Mason offered luxury pre-prepared picnics for high society. They are even credited with inventing the picnic hamper.¹⁶

With the advent of railways across Britain, more and more people could leave towns and cities for a day out in the countryside, further increasing the picnic’s appeal across the classes.  In the twentieth century, motor cars, bicycles, and supermarkets, meant that even the working classes could get in on the act. And they did, with gusto.

Legacy

While the wild antics of the Pic Nic Society introduced the word picnic to the English language, the picnic as we know it, really owes its enduring popularity to the middle and working classes, helped along by easier access to the countryside thanks to improvements in public and private forms of transport. They took the word and refashioned it. It became something a little more sedate, and a lot more inclusive. It became what we know it as today, an outdoor, community, potluck event, open to all classes, heck, even to wasps (and they’re not even invited).

Sources

Note, for a deep dive into all thinks picnic, I would heartily recommend Walter Levy’s Pic Nic Wit website (see link below).

British Newspaper Archive, various newspapers from 1802.

Holbrook Pierson, Melissa, The Seductive Nostalgia of the Picnic, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/the-seductive-nostalgia-of-the-picnic/521313/  Published in The Atlantic, 31 March 2017

Lee, Alexander, The History of the Picnic https://www.historytoday.com/archive/historians-cookbook/history-picnic Published in History Today Volume 69 Issue 7 July 2019

Levy, Walter, Pic Nic: A Club for Gamblers, Actors, and Pic Nic Dinners (1801)

Pic Nic: A Club for Gamblers, Actors, and Pic Nic Dinners (1801)

Tanner, Dr, The history of the London Picnic https://www.fortnumandmason.com/stories/history-of-the-london-picnic

Wikipedia Henry Francis Greville – Wikipedia

Wikipedia Richard Brinsley Sheridan – Wikipedia

Notes

1. Alexander Lee, The History of the Picnic
2. Ibid
3. Walter Levy, Pic Nic Wit
4. Wikipedia Henry Francis Greville
5. British Newspaper Archives
6. Walter Levy, Pic Nic Wit
7. Ibid
8. British Newspaper Archives
9. Walter Levy, Pic Nic Wit
10. British Newspaper Archives
11. Walter Levy, Pic Nic Wit
12. Wikipedia Richard Brinsley Sheridan
13. Walter Levy, Pic Nic Wit
14. British Newspaper Archives