200 years ago, John Neal set out to tell the world what a real Mainer is
200 years later, we're still re-imagining it.
“Is the language here put into the mouth of the New Englander that which is heard in real life? Are the manners here ascribed to him characteristic? However peculiar and however absurd they might be, they ought to be portrayed; nay, the more peculiar and the more absurd, so much the more do they deserve to be portrayed.”
John Neal, “The Downeasters,” 1833
For some, their first interaction with a Maine accent is in the character of Jud Crandall, as hammily played by Fred Gwynne in the original “Pet Sematary” movie. For others, it’s Maine-grown comedians like Tim Sample or Bob Marley, who use their Maine bona fides to great effect onstage. Even further back, there’s the “Bert & I” recordings by Marshall Dodge and Bob Bryan – folksy and dry and old-timey, by today’s standards.
A lot of people keep the Maine accent in the public consciousness, whether it’s an animated webseries, a TikTok account, or in commercials that remind us that no power line is safe to touch (ever). But the first person ever to deliberately highlight our peculiar way of speaking lived 200 years ago – a Portland man who, through sheer force of will and a kind of manic productivity, helped create the concept of American literature as we know it, as well as introduce the wider world to Mainers, with their dropped r’s and long vowels and peculiar turns of phrase.
John Neal, born in Portland in 1793, was an author, a journalist, an editor and a publisher, an art critic and the first American daily newspaper columnist. He was an ardent feminist and suffragist, an abolitionist and an activist for what today we’d call progressive causes. He was first a businessman, then a lawyer, and finally a property developer in early Portland, where he died in 1876, though he was always a writer. He painted portraits. He taught penmanship. He dropped out of school at age 12. He opened one of the first public gymnasiums in the country. He was a boxer and a fencer. At age 79 he punched out a guy nearly 60 years his junior on a Portland streetcar. He was the first person to ever use the phrase “son of a bitch” in a novel. He discovered Edgar Allen Poe.
Neal is one of the most interesting people you’ve probably never heard of. Nearly 200 years after he produced the majority of his published works, the critical consensus seems to be that he was a genius without a masterpiece – too impatient and scattered to knuckle down on his prodigious talents and do something truly great. Who among us that struggle with things like ADHD can’t empathize? He never quite got his shit together enough to be remembered in the same way as his contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne or Poe, his own protege.
If there’s one thing Neal is still known for, however, it is his determination to create an American literature; one distinct from the British literature that dominated colonial and early American writing, and which literary critics in his era tended to believe would never be anything but a retread of European writing.
Neal left New England in 1823 and headed to Old England in order to do that – reportedly, because he was so annoyed by a friend repeating a quote from another British writer, who said “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” If there’s one thing an old school New Englander can’t abide by, it’s a snob.
In London, Neal published lots of articles in literary magazines and other publications, but his major works there comprised two books: “American Writers,” widely regarded as the first collection of literary criticism of American writing, and “Brother Jonathan,” a sprawling, complex and – at least to modern readers – extremely difficult to read novel about the socio-political, cultural and linguistic diversity of America in the years during and after the Revolutionary War.
[Ed. note: I tried to read “Brother Jonathan.” I failed. It’s… a lot. It’s very, very long, and often pretty confusing. There are lovely passages and descriptions of people and places, and the characters feel authentic, but the plot: yikes. All over the place. I skipped big chunks until I got to the parts set in Maine, not gonna lie.]
“Brother Jonathan” was named for the mythical Brother Jonathan, a personification of New England and all its Yankee ways – thrifty, resourceful, unpretentious, wily, dryly witty, fiercely protective of democracy at all levels and yet fundamentally self-reliant. Later depictions of Brother Jonathan by racist xenophobes like the Know Nothings tried to attach intolerance and white supremacy to him, and his top hat and too-tight waistcoat later migrated onto Uncle Sam, another mythical personification of America – this time, one that elevates power and military might over the egalitarian values of his predecessor.
“Brother Jonathan” the book was moderately popular in the U.K. but made little impact back home in the U.S., and, despite Neal’s big plans, never made its way into the pantheon of great American writing. The full version is over 1,000 pages long, and a serialized version still swelled to nearly 400 pages; it’s also, at times, disjointed and confusing. Writers that came a decade or two later – like fellow Mainer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and part-time Mainer Harriet Beecher Stowe – had a lot more success in that regard. But that doesn’t mean the book didn’t have an outsize impact.
First, it established that a uniquely American literary voice was possible. And second, it provided the first-ever example to an international audience of uniquely American ways of speaking, colloquialisms, regional accents, customs and other specificities – in particular, of New Englanders and Mainers.
The novel’s protagonist, Walter, travels throughout New York, New England and the southern states, and extended passages of dialogue describe how a wide variety of people actually spoke back then – New Yorkers, Virginians, Black Americans, Indigenous people and, yes, Mainers. Well, soon-to-be Mainers. The novel takes place prior to statehood in 1820. But I digress.
We hear from Mainers living along the coast, with their taciturn mien, judicious choice of words and non-rhotic pronunciations - we’ve never loved our r’s here, have we? We hear from city folk in Portland, who still don’t have a ton of r’s, but do have a few more things to say than their more rural counterparts. We hear from Scottish immigrants and their descendents, their brogues tempered by their time in the states.
And, vitally, we hear from Penobscot people, who by the time “Brother Jonathan” was published had had most of their ancestral lands along the Penobscot River taken from them – through theft, force or bad deals – by European settlers. In the book, Walter travels to Indian Island and learns that he is of distant partial Penobscot and Mohawk ancestry. The Penobscot language itself, like so many precious Indigenous languages, has been kept alive and saved by the dogged work of Wabanaki scholars and language-keepers; Neal’s depiction of the way Penobscot people spoke English 200 years ago is also precious, in its own way, though it must be taken with a large dose of context, in that Neal was, y’know: a white guy.
While the reception of Neal’s depiction of American vernaculars was quite warm in England, in New England, people were outraged. When he returned to his native Portland in 1827, he was decried as having made Mainers out to look like country buffoons who could scarcely speak English properly, selling them out to high-minded literary types in Britain as something to laugh at. Neal – who went to London in order to shove American literature in their faces and convince them it was worthy — now was determined to stay put in Portland and shove his love and respect for his people in their own faces. I’ll friggin’ show you, bub.
Neal later wrote another novel, “The Downeasters,” set along Maine’s coast and among its seafaring people, and a play, “Our Ephraim, or The New Englanders,” which apparently goes even further into Maine vernacular, though I have yet to track down a full copy to read. The play never made it to the stage, as its lead actor found the Maine vernacular the entire script was written in too challenging to bring to life.
Today’s Mainers are, obviously, quite different from the ones depicted by Neal two centuries ago; and for that matter, from the ones depicted by Marshall Dodge 60 years ago. There are more of us, and we come from comparatively more diverse backgrounds. Our economy isn’t nearly so reliant on lumber, fishing and agriculture, and tourism – hardly a concern in Neal’s day, though it had exploded by the 20th century – is now among our top industries.
There’s been much talk about how the Maine accent is dying; that like so many other regional particulars across the country and the world, its edges and grooves and peculiarities are being smoothed out by the omnipresence of media, and by a monoculture that threatens all forms of regionality and distinctiveness, everywhere.
And yet, when I chat with the neighbors at camp, overhear conversations at the gas station, even when I hear myself say words like “scallop” and pronounce “yup” like “yut” and have a healthy distrust of rich folk in nice cars deciding their waterfront vacation homes should be treated like the goddamned friggin’ White House, I feel like a real Mainer. I talk like one too, even if I don’t strictly have a Maine accent. Not like my seventh grade English teacher, who added an r to the ending of words like “Toyota” and “Pizza” but removed them from words like “mother” and “radiator.” Not like my buddy Mike, who always takes Sat’day off, or the nice hospital nurse who said, without a single hint of irony, that a picture of a baby was wicked cunnin’.
There’s shared DNA between the sailors and farmers and townsfolk that populate Neal’s vision of Maine and New England, the laconic fishermen in Marshall Dodge’s stories, and Bob Marley’s rapid-fire jokes about his ridiculous extended Maine family. The latter two don’t happen without the first.
And anyway, stories and the words we choose to tell them with – like Neal’s and everyone that came after him – are the things that we share so that we know who we are, and so that everybody else knows it too, be they tourist, artist, journalist or scholar. We keep the Maine accent and the idea of a Mainer going because we want to; because it helps us stay connected to this place and these people, both long gone and just down the road a piece. It’s both a passive thing, in that it just happens in everyday conversation, and an active thing, in that we choose to keep it alive each time we put it out into the world.
And even if our stories aren’t exactly the truth and are a little embellished and may have been borrowed from one place or another, well, who cares? Did it make you laugh? Did it make you feel at home? Did it make you love a place like Maine a little more? Mission friggin’ accomplished.
“But for the Mainers there was a difference. They may not have identified with the characters and they may have felt these characters came from the next town, but they could share with them being from Maine, a beautiful place full of crusty independents, a place whose people had an identity that, for all its being a stereotype, could help any Mainer define himself in relation to all those others out there. It was not something to be ashamed of; it was something to be proud of.”
Edward “Sandy” Ives, “Maine Folklore and the Folklore of Maine: Some Reflections on the Maine Character and Down-East Humor,” 1984