Imagine, it is a beautiful day in the mid 1900s. Your Mummy and Daddy have promised to take you on a picnic this week, and you hope they remember – it is such a perfect day to be outdoors. You love picnicking, so much that Mummy found a little picnic set, just the right size for you to use with your dolls and your friends. Perhaps if Mummy and Daddy don’t take you picnicking today you could ask Mummy for some sandwiches to enjoy with your dolly.
When I took this picnic set to show the children, they loved it. They are all fond of picnics, as most children are, and to see a childs picnic set, with complete settings for four (even including cotton napkins) was surprising. They are far more used to paper napkins and adult picnic sets, and thought they would love to own this sweet little set themselves. They were also surprised that the plastic picnic set was so old. It dates from the 1950s or 1960s, a time when they assumed that china would be the material used for such items. Plastic was light weight, durable, colourful and modern though, and a popular choice.
Picnicking, as we enjoy it today, is actually very different to what picnicking originally meant. Picnics have their very earliest origins in the Medieval times, when wealthy people enjoyed elaborate and very fancy outdoor feasts, often associated with hunting parties. These feasts were very elaborate and usually the food was a selection of hams, baked meats and pastries, but they weren’t yet called picnics. The word picnic isn’t recorded anywhere in the English language until 1748, though it did exist in other countries before that. In fact, the word probably comes from the French language, though it may have come from the German.
In the 1700s and into the 1800s, picnics were actually often eaten indoors. The main focus of the picnic was that everybody would bring a dish to share, a bit like an American ‘potluck’. To ensure there weren’t lots of overlapping dishes, sometimes the picnickers would draw the names of dishes chosen by the hostess out of lots and then have to provide that dish. In the early 1800s in London, this idea was taken even further by a group who were known as ‘the picnic society’. Not only did they have to each provide food, but they also each provided some entertainment for everybody. We don’t know exactly when picnics started to be enjoyed outside again, as an informal and enjoyable meal, but they artworks from the 1860s suggest that by this time picnics were held outside. Over time, they evolved further to become relaxed meals which were often catered simply by one person. If you would like to learn more about the history of picnics, click here.
