John Neal, Doctor of American Literature

JOHN NEAL5 Cherry Streets. He was Superintendent of the First Day School at Moorestown, where he led the men's Bible Class. His interest in social improvement in the community of Moorestown, New Jersey, was noteworthy. He was very active in Friends General Conference, which he served in various official capacities, being a member of its Central Committee. The Directors of Friends Historical Association make this Minute in grateful remembrance of his useful service to the Society of Friends and to this Association in particular. JOHN NEAL, DOCTOR OF AMERICAN LITERATURE By John A. Pollard JOHN NEAL,* man of many facets, was generous, and he was also patriotic. He had, moreover, some literary discernment, and the critical judgments which abound in the Yankee,1 particularly in relation to younger American authors, were not ?John Neal (1793-1876), "author, editor, man of affairs, was the son of a Quaker schoolmaster of the same name" of Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. His early novels, referred to in the following article, had considerable sale. After some wandering, and after having been disowned from the Society of Friends, according to his own account, "for knocking a man who insulted him head over heels; for paying a militia fine; for making a tragedy ; and for desiring to be turned out, whether or no," he went to England for four years, returning in 1827 to New York, where he intended to settle and practice law. Hearing of threats because of supposed insults in his novels, he removed to Portland, his birthplace, where he established himself as author, editor, and business man. He was of a fearless but kindly and courteous disposition, a man of great energy and facile ability; but he is judged to have written too hastily and with too little restraint. Seventy-Six (1823) and Randolph (1823) are accounted the best of some thirteen novels credited to him; Brother Jonathan (1825) was published in Blackwood's Magazine during his English residence. He also wrote One Word More (1854), a religious treatise; an autobiography , Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life (1869) ; and a few poems and plays. (Dictionary of American Biography.)—Ed. 1 First brought out under Neal's editorship at Portland, Maine, as a weekly on January 1, 1828, the Yankee became the monthly Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette in July, 1829, with the poet John W. Miller as co-editor. 6 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION always vitiated by the kind of hopeful, bumptious Americanism which infected many of our newspapers and magazines about 1830. If Neal sounded the tocsin perhaps more loudly than any other American literary editor of his time, he also sounded it more clearly. Hawthorne, Longfellow, Poe, and Whittier were among the younger writers in whom he saw promise, and the latter two particularly, in their hard struggles, profited by his sane encouragement. Upon this head Neal's assertion in his autobiography are modest enough. He wrote that when the Yankee was "burning its way into public favor" he had as contributors Chief Justice Appleton, "John G. Whittier, who began his career with me, I believe," 2 Albert Pike, Edgar Allan Poe, Grenville Mellen, J. O. Rockwell, "and half a hundred, more or less, of writers who have since become distinguished. Poe sent his first poems to the Yankee, and proposed to dedicate a volume to me ; but I discouraged him, saying, that, in the existing state of public opinion, it would be a hindrance instead of a help, and he forebore." 3 This not too well known rôle of Neal's is explained logically enough. People who get up in life the hard way have frequently the greatest solicitude for younger strugglers than themselves, and equally the strongest attachment to the society whose measure they have taken. To this truism Neal, almost better than any other American literary man of his day, gives point. Apparently a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles of experience during his Maine youth, he yet contrived to order them into a pattern of the successful self-made man. By the age of thirty a Baltimore editor and the author of two narrative poems, a tragedy in verse, and five novels, Neal had even...