Gentleman’s Journal

The Gentleman’s Journal, or to give it its full title The Gentleman’s Journal. Or the Monthly Miscellany. By way of a Letter to A Gentleman in the Country. Consisting of News, History, Philosophy, Poetry, Musick, Translation , Etc.,^[1] published monthly from 1692 until 1694, was the precursor to what evolved into the modern magazine. Edited by Peter Anthony Motteux, a Huguenot^[a]Huguenots were French Protestants.^[2] who fled to England to escape religious persecution, it contained news of the month together with prose and poetry.^[3] The literary historian Margaret J. M. Ezell is among those who been been struck by how Motteux’s formatting and selection of materials during the Journal‘s thirty-three issues resembles that of 20th-century magazines aimed at a literary middle-class audience.^[1]

The literary historian Walter Graham considers The Gentleman’s Journal to be “the most important serial publication of the seventeenth century”, as until its foundation there had been a strong prejudice against fiction and poetry in such publications, considered to be unsuitable for the perusal of “serious readers”.^[1]