John Neal

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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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