Bends Toward Justice

Rereading this work, I recall how generous Dugan Murphy was (and he still is), and how equally generous and enthusiastic Bill Barry was.  Now my friend Herb Adams, then the merest acquaintance, has Barry's papers and is working on a book about Neal.  My excitement is rekindled.   No existing single work captures the multi-faceted genius of the man; most don't even do him justice in their area of focus.  The few words I have written are adequate to my self-assigned task, I hope; they don't come close to enumerating or explicating all his contributions to our culture.   Here's the conclusion:  John Neal Part Five: Portland In my first entry about John Neal, I called him a foundation stone of American culture.  I organized my evidence into explanations of his influence on literature, on art, and on progressive causes.  I also said I’d explain his role in bringing public gyms to the US, and “sneak in evidence that Neal’s fingerprints are all...

  Part Four: Progressive Causes Neal’s entry into the world of public intellectual debate and his espousal of feminism coincided.  In his autobiography, writing about a debate he participated in before he went to England, he writes about how he came to believe in women’s suffrage: “Take the best and most comprehensive definition of slavery, as you find it existing here, and you will be satisfied that one half of your whole white population -- that is, all your females, -- are born to slavery, that they live in slavery, and are dying in slavery…. They are taxed without representation.  They cannot hold office.  They are denied the right of suffrage.  All their earnings and savings, after marriage, belong to their husbands, or masters, who make the law.  They can neither acquire, hold, or transmit property, other than as their masters, the lawgivers, may prescribe (p. 50) After his return to Portland, feminism became the cause he devoted the most time and ene...

 In retrospect I can imagine someone saying, "Okay, he sounds like a fairly important figure in the development of American literature, but that doesn't make him that  significant in the culture as a whole."  Wait! No.  I can't.  That's too ignorant.  If I wrote the essay refuting that, the person who said it wouldn't be able to read or comprehend it.   Anyway, my point here is that I  majored in English at a college in Maine where most of the English department faculty were American Lit specialists, and no one ever mentioned John Neal. There's more to his influence than that: John Neal Part Three: Art Criticism Though Neal earned money as a miniature portraitist and watercolor instructor in his teens, he later denied any artistic ability.  Those early experiences may have contributed to his appreciation of portrait painters trained in sign painting and applied arts.   He began to write art criticism in his Baltimore days and i...

Since it's four years later, some things have changed.  Not with John Neal; he's still dead and underappreciated.  Dugan Murphy, identified back then as a contra dance caller, owns his own history walking tour business in Portland:  https://www.portlandbythefoot.com/guid e. John Neal Part Two: Literary Influence Given Neal’s background and childhood, it is amazing he even survived to adulthood.  He’d be considered a man of great accomplishment if he’d done none of the things I wrote of in the last paragraph, but had only done half of the other things he did in his life. Neal’s father died only a month after John and his twin sister Rachel were born.  His mother Rachel supported the family by opening her own school and taking in boarders.  With the assistance of their Quaker community, the Neal family lived in “genteel poverty.”  At age 12 Neal left school and home for full-time employment. He began his business career as a haberdasher and dry goods sal...

In 2022, as I was developing a walking tour business and writing about Portland history, I posted about John Neal on the business web site.  That site is no longer hosted, so I am reposting writings from it.  Here's part one about John Neal: John Neal  (August 25, 1793 – June 20, 1876) While I was training to lead a “Homes of Portland’s Golden Age” tour for Greater Portland Landmarks, we looked at a house on State Street and learned that it was John Neal’s house and that he was America’s first art critic.  That upper block of State Street was removed from the tour because of time constraints. Later I was researching the Portland Rum Riot for a presentation and learned that after the riot John Neal condemned the actions of his cousin, Mayor Neal Dow, saying Dow should be charged with murder. Those two pieces of information were fuzzy in my mind when I saw a post on FaceBook about the house https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/pphnegs_images_business/549/?fbclid=...