Gentlemanly Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731 to 1756

Abstract

‘All the World cries, There goes a GENTLEMAN: -And, when you have said GENTLEMAN, you have said EVERY THING’, ran the introduction to an excerpt from the Prompter in the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1736.¹ The lines came from John Crowne’s comedy, Sir Courtly Nice, spoken by the eponymous fop to explain as gentlemanly ‘complaisance’ his apparent hypocrisy in praising singers to their faces, only to criticize them later.²