Brother Jonathan: or, the New Englanders is an 1825 historical fiction novel by American writer John Neal. The title refers to American personification Brother Jonathan, who saw full development via this novel to become the US national emblem years before he was replaced by Uncle Sam. The story follows protagonist Walter Harwood as he and the society around him both come of age through the American Revolution. The novel explores cross-cultural relationships and highlights cultural diversity within the Thirteen Colonies, stressing egalitarianism and challenging the conception of a unified American nation. It features mixed-race Anglo-Indigenous characters and depicts them as the inheritors of North America. Its sexual content is explicit for the period, addressing female sexual virtue and male guilt for sexual misdeeds. Period critics reacted poorly to these aspects of the book.
Brother Jonathans early and thorough use of realism in depicting American culture and speech is superlative for the period and considered noteworthy by literature scholars. Using phonetic transcriptions, the dialogue documents a wide range of regional accents and colloquialism. This included a depiction of American Indian English likely more accurate than contemporaneous literature. The dialogue also includes what may be American literature's earliest attempt to express a wide range of emotion using children's natural speech patterns. These elements of the novel were praised in the UK but derided in the US. The author nevertheless considered them central to developing an American literature distinct from British precedent.
Written while Neal was crossing the Atlantic from Baltimore in early 1824, he revised it in London many times over and convinced William Blackwood of Edinburgh to publish it in mid 1825. It is Neal's longest work and possibly the longest single work of American fiction until well into the twentieth century. The editing process was the most laborious of Neal's career and he fashioned many of the deleted sections into separate works of short fiction he published later. Considered one of America's top novelists at the time, Neal wrote Brother Jonathan with a British audience in mind in order to boost his reputation internationally. It was a financial failure that received mixed but mostly warm reviews at the time. Twenty-first century readers are generally unaware of the book and scholars who are familiar with it generally consider it too complex to be considered good.
Plot
The novel begins one year before the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the Connecticut home of Presbyterian preacher Abraham Harwood. Abraham lives in the fictional community of Gingertown with his son Walter Harwood, his Virginian niece Edith Cummin, and a mysterious figure named Jonathan Peters. The introductory chapters illustrate the individual nature of the characters within the specific cultural context of New England. Walter loves Edith and feels jealous of her relationship with Jonathan. Information presented by Jonathan implicates Abraham in a murder that occurred near Abraham's church. The location holds a haunting reputation in the community and the plant life there appears to them to exude a memory of the crime. Jonathan exposes more evidence in order to implicate himself and draw attention away from Abraham, though he lets Abraham know that he believes Abraham to be fully culpable for the crime. Jonathan is driven away from the community.
Following Jonathan's departure from Gingertown, Walter becomes restless in his rural surroundings. His father will not let him leave for New York City. Walter grew up spending much of his time in the forest among Indigenous people, particularly his friend Bald Eagle. While wandering the forest, Walter gets caught in a spring flood. Bald Eagle saves him and brings his unconscious friend to the Harwood home. Edith encounters Walter and they express love for each other and become engaged.
Walter finally earns his father's consent to leave home and takes a stage coach to New York following a send-off from community members exhibiting particular New England customs. He briefly encounters Nathan Hale en route to New York. Walter arrives at a tavern in the city where he meets many upstanding urbanites. He is simultaneously disgusted by them and also made to feel inferior to them. He gets a job in a counting house and moves into a Quaker household, where he learns that his father has been killed and his family home seized by Tories.