ABSTRACT
Joseph C. Neal (1807-1847) was raised in genteel poverty in Phila delphia. He was educated in his mother’s bookstore and lending li brary and left Philadelphia only briefly in 1829 to gather journeyman experience in the “flush times” coalfields of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He was editor of the Philadelphia daily Pennsylvanian from 1831 through 1844, with breaks to recoup his always-fragile health. With Louis Godey he founded the Philadelphia Saturday News and went on to found Neal’s Saturday Gazette, one of the most intelligently literate weeklies of the 1840s. He encouraged comic writers like John S. Robb and Frances M. Berry Whitcher (Widow Bedott) and was known him self as the “American Boz” for his Dickensian sketches of urban downand-outers, published first in his weeklies and then as “City Worthies” in the Pennsylvanian.
