page_title: John Neal (writer)
section_title: Lecturing
hierarchical_section_title: John Neal (writer) / Lecturing
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the First Parish Church on Congress Street at the head of Temple Street in Portland, Maine, USA, viewed from Southwest corner of Temple and Congress Streets. Photo taken with a Google Pixel phone on June 27, 2020.
context_page_description: John Neal was an American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist. Considered both eccentric and influential, he delivered speeches and wrote magazine essays, novels, poems, and short stories between the 1810s and 1870s in the US and Great Britain, championing American literary nationalism and regionalism in their earliest stages. Neal advanced the development of American art, advocated for early feminist causes, advocated the end of slavery and racism, and helped establish the gymnastics movement in the US.
  A pioneer of colloquialism and natural diction, John Neal is the first author to use "son-of-a-bitch" in a work of fiction. He attained his greatest literary achievements between 1817 and 1835, during which time he was central to American literature's evolution from the British influences dominant in works of founding American authors James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, whom he derided, to the new voices of American Renaissance authors Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, all of whom he influenced.
context_section_description: Between 1829 and 1848 Neal supplemented his income as a lecturer. Traveling on the lyceum circuit he spoke on topics such as “literature, eloquence, the fine arts, political economy, temperance, poets and poetry, public-speaking, our pilgrim-fathers, colonization, law and lawyers, the study of languages, natural-history, phrenology, women’s-rights, self-education, self-reliance, and self-distrust, progress of opinion, &c., &c., &c.” His first lecture was in February 1829, on the topic of temperance at a meeting of the Portland Association for the Promotion of Temperance in Portland, Maine at the First Parish Church. His last was titled “Man” and was held at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in September 1848. All but a few of these lectures were written in advance and published afterward to reach a wider audience.
  In the years following the February 1829 temperance lecture, Neal was invited to lecture on various topics before groups hosted by institutions such as Colby College in Waterville, Maine and the Maine Charitable Mechanics Association in Portland. Like his first (limited) public speaking experience with the debating society in Baltimore in 1823, in which he simultaneously attacked the legal bases for Black American enslavement and denial of women’s rights, his first public speech on women’s rights after returning from England was spontaneous. He was asked on the spot to address a crowd on the subject of freedom at Portland’s Second Parish Church on Independence Day 1832. Neal accepted and gave an unprepared speech using the subjects of freedom and the Independence Day holiday to attack contemporary institutions as affronts to freedom: enslavement of Black Americans, denial of women’s rights to property ownership under coverture, and denial of women’s suffrage as taxation without representation – the foundation of American independence from England.
  After the Independence Day 1832 speech, women’s rights became a favorite topic of his frequent lecture engagements between 1832 and 1843 in places like Portland, Maine; Boston, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; and New York, New York. Because they were almost always published afterward and often covered in newspaper reviews, these events broadened Neal’s sphere of influence and made his ideas more accessible to readers not necessarily aligned with his views. His oratory style was described by Margaret Fuller in 1837: “Mr. Neal does not argue quite fairly, he uses reason while it lasts, and then, if he gets into a scrape, helps himself out by wit, by sentiment or strings of assertions. But if I had him by myself I think I could drive him to the wall.” Despite this “exaggeration and coxcombry,” though, she admired his “magnetic genius,” “lion heart,” and “sense of the ludicrous.”
  His most well-attended address was titled “Rights of Women” at New York’s City’s largest auditorium at the time, the Broadway Tabernacle, part of a lecture series sponsored by the Mechanics’ Library Association. Held on January 24, 1843, it was attended by an estimated 3,000 people and was widely covered in the periodicals like the New-York Tribune and New York Herald.
caption: First Parish Church, the site John Neal's first scheduled lecture in 1829
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