John Neal

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John Neal (1793-1976), author and art/literary critic, was born in August 25, 1793.

He was a man of many talents and aspirations, some of whom were pioneering in his day.

For example, he is credited as the first American author to use colloquialism in his writing, breaking with more formal literary traditions.

However, he was still undisciplined and rambling, so his literary work has slipped into obscurity despite its timelessness.

He was also an early women's rights advocate, prohibitionist, temperance advocate, opponent of dueling, accomplished lawyer, boxer, and architect.

Childhood and early employment

On August 25, 1793, John Neal and his twin sister Rachel were born in the Massachusetts District of Maine, the only children of parents John and Rachel Hall Neal. A month later, John Neal, a school teacher, died. Neal's mother, who was described by former student Elizabeth Oakes Smith as a woman of "clear intelligence, no little self-reliance, and no chance of will," made up the missing family's money by opening her own academy and renting rooms in her home to boarders. In addition, she received support from the siblings' unmarried uncle, James Neal, and others in the Quaker neighborhood. Neal grew up in "genteel poverty" after attending his mother's kindergarten, a Quaker boarding school, and Portland's public school.

Neal's lifelong struggle with a short temper and violent tendencies began in the public school, where he was mocked and physically assaulted by peers and the schoolmaster. Neal left school and home at the age of twelve to avoid his mother's financial burden.

Neal's adolescent haberdasher and dry goods salesman learned dishonest business practices such as giving counterfeit money to customers and misleading product quality and quantity. Laid off several times due to corporate flops as a result of US embargoes against British imports, Neal traveled through Maine as an itinerant penmanship instructor, watercolor instructor, and miniature portrait artist. He answered an ad for work with a dry goods store in Boston and then to the greater city, 1814.

Neal formed a Boston business relationship with John Pierpont and Pierpont's brother in-law, whereby they exploited supply chain constraints imposed by the War of 1812 to make quick money smuggling contraband British dry goods. They opened stores in Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston before the war ended the company and left Pierpont and Neal bankrupt in Baltimore in 1816. Although the "Pierpont, Lord, and Neal" wholesale/retail chain was short-lived, Neal's friendship with Pierpont grew into his closest and longest-lived friendship of his life.

Neal's work during the numerous booms and busts that eventually left him bankrupt at the age of twenty-two turned him into a vibrant, optimistic young man who saw reliance on his own abilities and resources as the key to his recovery and future success.

Neal's time in Baltimore between his business failure in 1816 and his arrival in London in 1823 was the busiest period of his life, as he juggled overlapping careers in editorship, journalism, poetry, novels, law research, and later, law practice. During this period, he taught himself to read and write in eleven languages, published seven books, read law for four years, completed an independent course of law in eighteen months, two of which he edited at various times, and served in an academic institution.

Neal's bankruptcy appeal was dismissed two months after, but he soon became the magazine's second-most prolific writer of poetry, essays, and literary criticism, although he never paid. For what seemed to be the last issue, two years later he was appointed editor. The magazine was closely associated with the Delphian Club, which he founded in 1816 with Dr. Tobias Watkins, John Pierpont, and four other men. For several of the happy memories and work ties Neal enjoyed in Baltimore, he felt he was indebted to this "high-minded, generous, and unselfish" group. When he was writing his first poetry, novels, and essays, he was researching law as an unpaid apprentice in William H. Winder's office, a fellow Delphian.

Neal's business failure left him with enough "money to request a letter from the post office," so Neal "cast about for something better to do" and "after considering the situation for ten minutes or so, I'm determined to try my hand at a novel." Just over seventy novels had been published by "not more than half a dozen [American] writers when he wrote his first book; out of these, only Washington Irving had more than enough to pay for the salt in his porridge." Neal was nevertheless inspired by Pierpont's financial success with his poem The Airs of Palestine (1816) and encouraged by the reception of his first submissions to The Portico. "There was nothing left for me except authorship or starvation," he said if I persisted in my study scheme.

Neal's nighttime deterrence from writing his first and only bound volume of poetry was Neal's nighttime deprivation from 16 hours a week to produce an index of the Hezekiah Niles' Weekly Register magazine, which Niles described as "the most laborious work of any country ever existed."

He published a play, took his first paying job as a newspaper editor, and wrote three-quarters of the American Revolution, which no one else mentioned except Paul Allen. Neal's long literary output earned him the moniker "Jehu O'Cataract" from his Delphian Club colleagues. By these means, he was able to pay his bills while doing his apprenticeship and studying law independently. In 1820, he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law in Baltimore.

Neal's last years in Baltimore were his most fruitful as a novelist. He wrote one book in 1822 and three more the year after, gaining the title of America's top novelist. He left the Delphian Club on bad terms and received expulsion from the Society of Friends as a result of his involvement in a street brawl. His son Edward Coote Pinkney, a respected lawyer, challenged Neal to a duel after Pinkney died in reaction to insults against prominent lawyer William Pinkney published in Randolph shortly after Pinkney died. Neal refused and the two brothers engaged in a war of printed words in the fall of that year, having established himself six years earlier as an outspoken critic of dueling. Neal became "weary of the law," a feeling that he spent those years in "open war" with the entire tribe of attorneys in America. "Ironically,... at the time [Neal] was attempting to establish himself as the American writer, Neal was alienating friends, critics, and the general population at an alarming rate."

Neal was planning to move south from Baltimore by late 1823. "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book," the catalyst for moving to London, according to him. If it had more to do with Smith or Pinkney, Neal took less than a month after that dinner date to resolve his affairs in Baltimore and gain passage on a ship bound for the United Kingdom on December 15, 1823.

Neal's move to London fulfilled three main literary objectives that had accompanied him throughout the 1820s: to replace Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper as the leading American literary voice, and to end the British literary establishment's disdain for American writers. Irving used a temporary residence in London to gain more funds and notoriety from the British literary market, as a result of Irving's example. Seventy-Six and Logan had already pirated, but Neal hoped that if they were able to publish Errata and Randolph if he were to negotiate. They declined.

Neal had enough funds to last for only a few months on the assumption that "people [sic] for books would not be able to starve me here," says the author, who could live on air and write faster than any man who ever lived." William Blackwood begged Neal in April 1824 to become a regular contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, putting his financial situation into jeopardy. Neal was "handsomely paid" to be one of the magazine's most prolific contributors for the next year and a half.

His first Blackwood's essay, a look at the 1824 candidates for US president and the five presidents who had been active to that point, was the first American essay to appear in a British literary journal and was widely distributed throughout Europe. The American Writers collection was Neal's most important contribution to the journal in the first written history of American literature. Neal's first written works on gender and women's rights, as well as his book Brother Jonathan, were published in black and white in autumn 1825, but the relationship was soured, and Neal was now without a source of income.

John Neal, thirty-two years old, met seventy-seven year-old utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in London Debating Societies after a brief period of writing articles for other British periodicals. Bentham gave him rooms at his "Hermitage" and a position as his personal secretary in late 1825. Neal's Westminster Review published a year and a half.

Bentham sponsored Neal's return to the United States in spring 1827. He left the UK having captured the imagination of the British literary elite, wrote the book he brought with him, and "succeeded to perfection" in educating the British people about American institutions, habits, and prospects. However, Brother Jonathan was not honoured as the best American book, and it failed to earn Neal the international recognition he aspired for, so he returned to the United States as Cooper's chief rival.

In June 1827, Neal returned to Europe, but he was first to visit his mother and sister in Portland, Maine. In Blackwood's Magazine, he was confronted by residents who mocked him by his denigration of popular people in Brother Jonathan's semi-autobiographical Errata, his portrayal of New England dialect and lifestyles, as well as his critique of American writers. Neal's residents circulated broadsides, engaged in verbally and physically strife, and they conspired to prevent his entry to the bar from being admitted to the bar. Neal defiantly decided to settle in Portland rather than New York. "Very, verily,'" said the author, "I'll remain in the graveyard if nowhere else."

Neal, a born in London, was a promoter of the US of athletics, including Friedrich Jahn's early Turnen gymnastics and boxing and fencing techniques he learned in Paris, London, and Baltimore. In 1827, he opened Maine's first gymnasium, making him the first American to open a public gym in the United States. In his law office, he gave lessons in boxing and fencing. He began training in Saco and Bowdoin College the same year. Thomas Jefferson was encouraged to include a gymnastics school at the University of Virginia the year before he had published articles on German gymnastics in the American Journal of Education. Neal's athletic pursuits gave him "a new sense of masculinity" that favored "forbearance based on strength" and helped him curb the unhealthy habits with which he suffered throughout his life.

Neal founded The Yankee magazine with himself as editor in 1828, and the magazine continued to publish until 1829. He used its pages to vindicate himself, analyze American art and drama, host a discussion about New Englander identity, promote emerging feminist theories, and inspire new literary voices, the majority of which are women. Neal also edited several other periodicals from the late 1820s to the mid-1840s, and was a highly sought-after contributor on a variety of topics during this period.

Neal published three books from sources he wrote in London and concentrated his latest creative writing efforts on a series of short stories resembling his finest literary achievement. Between 1828 and 1846, Neal published an average of one story per year, which was instrumental in the development of the nascent short story style. He began traveling in 1829, peaking his role in the women's rights movement in 1843 when he was speaking to huge audiences in New York City and reaching wider audiences through the media. Neal's law apprentice James Brooks captured this period of juggling literary, activist, athletic, academic, cultural, social, and company pursuits in 1833.

Neal's second cousin Eleanor Hall married him in 1828, and the couple had five children together between 1829 and 1847. The couple raised their children in the house he built on Portland's prestigious State Street in 1836. He received an honorary master's degree from Bowdoin College, the same institution where Neal worked as a student penmanship instructor and later educated the more wealthy Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Neal became less prominent in literary circles and more involved with research, activism, and local arts and civic causes, particularly after receiving inheritances from two paternal uncles that significantly reduced his need to depend on writing as a source of income. James Neal died in 1832 and Stephen Neal in 1836, but Stephen Neal's second inheritance was delayed until 1858 in a court conflict involving Stephen's daughter, suffragist Lydia Neal Dennett. He became Maine's first agent for Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company in 1845, receiving enough commissions to move to retirement from teaching, civil service, and most writing assignments. Neal began constructing and managing local real estate, including multiple granite quarries, expanding railroad links to Portland, and investing in land speculation in Cairo, Illinois. He pioneered the campaign to include Portland as a city and install the community's first parks and sidewalks. He became interested in architecture, interior design, and furniture layout, as well as the creation of pioneering, simple, and cost-effective designs that inspired other designers outside of his immediate region.

Many of Neal's literary contemporaries mistook it for a disappearance. "That nutty fellow, John Neal," Hawthorne wrote in 1845, "probably has long been dead, but otherwise he never knew." "I was found in Maine the sinews and cords of his pugilist brain," James Russell Lowell wrote in 1848. In 1860, friend and fellow Portland resident Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described Neal as "a good deal tempered down but also a fire strong."

Neal converted to Congregationalism in 1851, after years of vaguely identifying with Unitarianism and universalism. He found new moral defenders for women's rights, potential freedom from his violent tendencies, and inspiration for seven religious essays through deepening religiosity. In an effort to reframe "the reasoning and contemplative among believers," Neal's "exhortations" in One Word More (1854), which "rambles vociferously for two hundred pages and closes with a breathless metaphor."

John Neal returned to novel writing late in life, publishing True Womanhood in 1859 at the request of Longfellow and other acquaintances. He wrote three dime novels to fill a void in his income between 1863 and 1866. In 1869, he published his "most readable book, and certainly one of the most entertaining autobiographies to come out of nineteenth-century America." Neal's reflections on his life prompted him to expand his activism and assume regional leadership positions in the women's suffrage movement. His last two books, titled Great Mysteries and Little Plagues (1870), as well as a primer book for his hometown, Portland Illustrated (1874), were among his collection of articles about children and youth.

He had amassed a good fortune by 1870, despite being in his old age, valuing at $80,000. His last public appearance was likely an 1875 syndicated paper from the Portland Advertiser about an eighty-one-year-old Neal physically overpowering a man in his early twenties who was smoking on a non-smoking streetcar. John Neal was born on June 20, 1876, and was buried in the Neal family's plot in Portland's Western Cemetery.

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Building a career in Baltimore

Neal's time in Baltimore between his business failure in 1816 and his move to London in 1823 was the busiest period of his life, as he juggled overlapping careers in editorship, journalism, poetry, literature, law, and later, law practice. During this time, he taught himself to read and write in eleven languages, published seven books, and supervised an independent law school in eighteen months that was supposed to be finished in seven to eight years, two of which he edited at different times.

He made his first contribution to The Portico two months after Neal's bankruptcy case and quickly became the magazine's second-most prolific writer of poetry, essays, and literary analysis, though he was never paid. He took over as editor for what ended up being the last issue two years later. The journal was closely affiliated with the Delphian Club, which he founded in 1816 with Dr. Tobias Watkins, John Pierpont, and four other men. Neal was indebted to this "high-minded, generous, unselfish" group of "intellective and companionable" individuals for many of the happy memories and working relationships he had in Baltimore. He was studying law as an unpaid apprentice in William H. Winder, a fellow Delphian, while writing his first poetry, novels, and essays.

Neal's company failure left him without enough "money to request a letter from the post-office," so Neal "cast out for something better to do," and "I'm determined to try my hand at a novel." Fewer than seventy books had been published by "not more than half a dozen [American] authors, and of those, only Washington Irving had enough money to pay for the salt in his porridge." Neal was still inspired by Pierpont's financial success with his poem The Airs of Palestine (1816) and energized by the reception of his first submissions to The Portico. "There was nothing left for me but authorship or starvation," if I persisted in my effort to study law," he stated.

Neal's nighttime distraction from working 16 hours a week for more than four months led to the creation of an index for six years of Hezekiah Niles' weekly newspaper, which Niles acknowledged was "the most labourious work of the kind that has ever appeared in any country."

In 1819, he published a play, started his first paying job as a newspaper editor, and wrote three-quarters of History of the American Revolution, despite Paul Allen's account. Neal's strong literary output earned him the moniker "Jehu O'Cataract" from his Delphian Club colleagues. By these methods, he was able to pay his bills while completing his apprenticeship and independently studying law. In 1820, he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law in Baltimore.

Neal's last years in Baltimore were his best as a novelist. He published one book in 1822 and three more the following year, eventually rising to the position of America's top novelist. After being involved in a street brawl, he left the Delphian Club on bad terms and accepted expulsion from the Society of Friends. Edward Coote Pinkney, a prominent lawyer, was charged by Neal in reaction to insults received in Randolph shortly after Pinkney died. Neal refused and the two adversaries engaged in a war of printed words in the fall of that year, having proclaimed himself six years earlier as an outspoken critic of dueling. Neal became "weary of the statute," implying that he spent those years in "open war" with the entire tribe of attorneys in America. "Ironically, [...] at a time when [Neal] was attempting to establish himself as the American writer, Neal was also alienating friends, critics, and the general public at an alarming rate."

Neal was planning to move to Baltimore by late 1823. "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book," says the catalyst for his transfer to London. Neal took less than a month after the dinner date to discuss his family life in Baltimore and gain passage on a ship bound for the United Kingdom on December 15, 1823, whether it had more to do with Smith or Pinkney.

Neal's move to London fulfilled three main literary ambitions that had accompanied him through the 1820s: to replace Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper as the leading American literary voice, and to reverse the British literary establishment's disdain for American writers. Irving followed Irving's example of obtaining more money and notoriety from the British literary market by renting a temporary residence in London. Seventy-Six and Logan had already pirated, but Neal hoped that they would pay him to publish Errata and Randolph if he were present to negotiate. They declined.

Neal had enough funds to last for just a few months on the assumption that "people [sic] for books would not be able to starve me, since I could live on air and write faster than any man ever lived." When William Blackwood begged Neal in April 1824 to become a regular contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, his financial situation became desperate. Neal was "handsomely paid" to be one of the magazine's most prolific contributors this year and a half.

His first Blackwood article, a study on the 1824 candidates for president and the five presidents who had lived to that point, was published and distributed widely throughout Europe. The American Writers collection was Neal's most notable contribution to the magazine in its first written history of American literature. Blackwood hosted Neal's earliest written books on gender and women's rights, as well as publication Brother Jonathan, but the friendship was soured until autumn 1825, when Neal's back-and-forth about manuscript revisions soured the relationship, and Neal was now without a source of income.

John Neal, thirty-two years old, met seventy-seven-year-old utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham through the London Debating Societies after spending less money on writing articles for other British periodicals. In late 1825, Bentham gave him rooms at his "Hermitage" and a position as his personal secretary. Neal wrote for Bentham's Westminster Review for a year and a half.

Bentham sponsored Neal's return to the United States in 1827. He left the UK having captured the attention of the British literary elite, wrote the book he carried with him, and "succeeded to perfection" in educating the British people about American institutions, habits, and prospects. Despite this, Brother Jonathan was not published as the great American novel, and it failed to achieve Neal the international renown he had aspired for, so he returned to the United States, not as Cooper's chief competitor.

Neal returned to the United States from Europe in June 1827 with plans to settle in New York City, but first in his hometown Portland to visit his mother and sister. In Blackwood's Magazine, he was confronted by people who mocked him, including his derision of well-known people in Brother Jonathan's semi-autobiographical Errata, his portrayal of New England dialect and lifestyles, and his critique of American writers. Residents circulated broadsides, engaged in verbally and physically abusive conversations with Neal on the streets, and conspired to prevent his entry to the bar. Neal defiantly agreed to settle in Portland rather than New York. "Very well,' said the author, "If they're here, I will remain" until I am both roots and grounded—grounded in the graveyard, if nowhere else."

Neal was a promoter of sports in the United States, including Friedrich Jahn's early Turnen gymnastics and boxing and fencing methods he learned in Paris, London, and Baltimore. In 1827, he opened Maine's first gymnasium, making him the first American to open a public gym in the United States. In his law office, he taught boxing and fencing. He began training in Saco and Bowdoin College during the same year. Thomas Jefferson was advised to enroll a gymnastics school at the University of Virginia the year before he had published articles on German gymnastics in the American Journal of Education. Neal's athletic career gave him "a new sense of maleness" that favored "forbearance based on strength" and assisted him in coping with his violent tendencies with which he suffered throughout his life.

Neal founded The Yankee magazine in 1828 as editor and editor, which continued to be published until 1829. He used its pages to reassure fellow Portlanders, analyze American art and drama, host a discussion of New Englander identity, promote feminist theories, and foster new literary voices, the majority of which are women. Neal has edited several other periodicals from the late 1820s to the mid-1840s, and he was also a highly sought-after contributor on a variety of subjects during this period.

Neal published three books from books he wrote in London and concentrated his new literary writing efforts on a collection of short stories that reflected his best literary achievement. Between 1828 and 1846, Neal published an average of one story per year, assisting in the development of the relatively new short story style. He began traveling in 1829, peaking his fame in the women's rights movement in 1843 when he was addressing large audiences in New York City and wider audiences through the media. Neal's law apprentice James Brooks captured this period of juggling literary, feminist, academic, socioeconomic, political, cultural, and company pursuits in 1833.

Neal married Eleanor Hall in 1828, and the couple had five children together from 1829 to 1847. The two children were raised in the house he built on Portland's prestigious State Street in 1836. He earned an honorary master's degree from Bowdoin College, the same institution where Neal earned his livelihood as a self-employed teenage penmanship instructor and that later trained the more wealthy Nathaniel and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Neal became less active in literary circles and more involved with community, activism, and civic causes, particularly after receiving inheritances from two paternal uncles that greatly reduced his need to rely on writing as a source of income. James Neal died in 1832 and Stephen Neal in 1836, but his second inheritance was delayed until 1858, when a court contest involving Stephen's daughter, suffragist Lydia Neal Dennett, was frozen until 1858. He became Maine's first agent, earning enough in commissions that he decided to withdraw from teaching, litigation, and most writing jobs in 1845. Neal began constructing and operating local real estate, including several granite quarries, expanding railroad links to Portland, and investing in land speculation in Cairo, Illinois. He pioneered the movement to place Portland as a city and built the city's first parks and sidewalks. He became interested in architecture, interior design, and furniture layout, as well as providing innovative, simple, and cost-effective solutions that inspired other designers outside of his immediate region.

Neal's transition was seen as a loss among his literary contemporaries, according to several of his literary contemporaries. "That fright fellow, John Neal," Hawthorne wrote in 1845, "surely has long been dead," but "never could sit at a table," he wrote. In 1848, James Russell Lowell said he had "wasted in Maine the sinews and cords of his pugilist brain." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Portland native, described Neal in 1860 as "a good deal tempered down but not quite enough."

In 1851, Neal converted to Congregationalism after years of vaguely identifying with Unitarianism and Universalism. He discovered new moral arguments for women's rights, potential freedom from his violent tendencies, and inspiration for seven religious essays. Neal wrote these "exhortations" in One Word More (1854), which "rambles ardently for two hundred pages and closes with a breathless metaphor" in an attempt to convert "the reason and wisdom among believers."

John Neal returned to novel writing late in life, publishing True Womenhood in 1859 at the behest of Longfellow and other associates. He wrote three dime novels to fill a void in his income between 1863 and 1866. He published his "most readable book, and certainly one of the most entertaining autobiographies to come out of nineteenth-century America" in 1869. Neal's reflections on his life inspired him to extend his activism and take on regional leadership positions in the women's suffrage movement. His two books, titled Great Mysteries and Little Plagues (1870), and a look at his hometown, Portland Illustrated (1874), are two collections of works for and about children.

He had amassed a decent fortune by 1870, when he was in his old age, valuing at $80,000. His last public appearance was probably an 1875 syndicated newspaper from the Portland Advertiser about an eighty-one-year-old Neal physically overpowering a man in his early twenties who was smoking on a non-smoking streetcar. John Neal died on June 20, 1876, and he was buried in the Neal family plot in Portland's Western Cemetery.

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