the first English novelists who names picnics. She has two outdoor picnics in the novel Emma (1816). One is in the strawberry garden at Donwell Abbey. Parties, where guests would pick their own strawberries, were popular in the early nineteenth century and Mrs Elton wearing a large bonnet and carrying a basket spoke at length about them. The second is at Box Hill in Surrey. This picnic turns out to be a sore disappointment, Frank Churchill said to Emma: 'Our companions are excessively stupid. What shall we do to rouse them? Any nonsense will serve...' The food is described in vague terms as a 'cold collation'. While Jane Austen talked excessively about food in her private letters, she was less obliging in her novels. At both of these occasions, in Emma, when food is eaten outside it ends in 'ruffled tempers and hurt feelings' according to food historian Maggie Lane. In Alfred Tennyson's poem Audley Court (1838) the picnickers eat dark bread and cold game pie in aspic and drink cider while they sing and chat about their old love affairs.There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid A damask napkin wrought with horse and hound, Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home, And, half-cut-down, a pasty costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied; last, with these, A flask of cider from his father's vats, Prime, which I knew; and so we sat and ate And talked old matters over; who was dead, Who married, who was like to be, and how. In Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) a 'potluck' meal is described "For dinner we'll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we'll have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we'll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we'll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare - in short we'll have whatever there is on hand.' But Dickens, Levy argues, 'differentiates potluck and picnic' when he adds that 'Miss Twinkleton (in her amateur state of existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a picnic'. The Wind in the Willows (1908), the classic children's novel by Kenneth Grahame, begins with a much-quoted impromptu excursion;