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Caricature of a Macaroni, 1773

"What is this my Son Tom", 1774

A macaroni, in mid-18th-century England, was a fashionable fellow who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected and epicene manner. The term pejoratively referred to a person who exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed together English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire.

Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour adopted the Italian word maccherone — a boorish fool in Italian — and said that anything that was fashionable or à la mode was ‘very macaroni’. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend in 1764 of “the Macaroni Club, which is composed of all the traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses.” The “club” was not a formal one: the expression was particularly used to characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with stripes and tall, powdered wigs with a little hat on top which was so high that it could only be removed on the point of a sword. Macaronis combined the enjoyment of wine, sex and song with effeminacy of dress. They are a precursor to the dandy and the metrosexual.

In 1773, James Boswell was on tour in Scotland with the stout and serious-minded essayist and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, the least dandified of Londoners. Johnson was awkward in the saddle, and Boswell ribbed him: “You are a delicate Londoner; you are a maccaroni; you can't ride.”^[1]

In Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), when the misunderstanding is discovered and young Marlow finds he has been mistaken, he cries out, “So then, all's out, and I have been damnably imposed on. O, confound my stupid head, I shall be laughed at over the whole town. I shall be stuck up in caricatura in all the print-shops. The Dullissimo Maccaroni. To mistake this house of all others for an inn, and my father's old friend for an innkeeper!”

The song “Yankee Doodle” from the time of the American Revolutionary War talks of a man who ‘stuck a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni,’ the joke being that the Yankees were naive enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a Macaroni. Whether or not these were alternative lyrics sung in the British army, they were enthusiastically taken up by the yankees themselves. See variations and parodies.

• Fop
• Dandy
• Metrosexual
• Charles James Fox
• 1750-1795 in fashion
• Macaroni penguin
• William Dodd (1729-1777), the "macaroni parson"

• Rictor Norton, "The Macaroni Club: Homosexual Scandals in 1772" in Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 19 December 2004, updated 11 June 2005
• The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale: "Preposterous Headdresses and Feathered Ladies: Hair, Wigs, Barbers, and Hairdressers" Exhibition, 2003