The Seductive Nostalgia of the Picnic

Once upon a time, every meal was a picnic. Then people got roofs and things.

Eventually, they set about inventing an occasion to revisit that rustic past. The industrial age transformed the al fresco repast into an escape from the strictures of increasingly urbanized life. The picnic became a pleasure excursion to places that were once survival’s battlefield.

For 250 years, the picnic reigned as a premier entertainment for wide swaths of society. In the process, it inspired nostalgia, tested the boundaries of morality, and became a cottage business. Today, the picnic persists. But in large part, it has become a cultural memory instead of an activity.

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Romanticism was the aesthetic consequence of the Industrial Revolution’s changes to social and material life. The movement reappraised nature, helping shape picnics as a cultural fad. In the hundred years after 1750, the population of England