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Rachel Dyer

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The Salem witch trials, a shameful episode in early New England history, provided a salient theme for several nineteenth-century American writers, including John Greenleaf Whittier and John William De Forest. Novelist and reformer John Neal (1793-1876) was an advocate of, among other causes, female suffrage and capital punishment reform. His novel, Rachel Dyer (1828) deals with the hysteria and scape-goating that surrounded the trials. Mixing drama with history, Neal exposes, through his protagonists, the still explosive issues of injustice and religious bigotry.
John Neal was born in Portland, Maine, of Quaker parentage, on August 25, 1793. Trained as as lawyer, Neal throughout his life defended such radical causes as female suffrage, abolition of slavery, and capital punishment reform. In 1823, Neal left a promising law practice in Baltimore to travel to England, where he lived for the next four years. There he became acquainted with Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians. He also published a series of essays in Blackwood's Magazine reviewing American authors, partly as a rebuttal to England's dismissal of American literature. It was in Blackwood's that Neal published a short story that he would revise and expand as the novel Rachel Dyer. While a practicing lawyer, Neal had already published six novels and had gained a reputation as an astute literary critic. Rachel Dyer, published in 1828 and considered his best work, is loosely based on the events surrounding the trial for witchcraft of the seventeenth-century New England preacher George Burroughs. The Salem witch trials, and the choice of a Quaker heroine, Rachel Dyer, gave Neal the opportunity to expose a shameful period of religious repression as well as to indict English law and procedure in colonial America. Using a fiery preacher and a Quaker woman as his protagonists, Neal highlights the real issues of the trials, which are injustice and bigotry--a theme that would be taken up more than a century later in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. John Neal died in Portland, Maine, on June 20, 1876. Neal's other works include the novels Keep Cool (1817), Logan (1822), Seventy-Six (1823), The Down-Easters (1833), and True Womanhood (1859), the play Our Ephraim (1835), and several tales and short stories.
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