magazine, which Niles admitted was "the most laborious work of the kind that ever appeared in any country". In 1819, he published a play and took his first paying job as a newspaper editor, becoming the country's first daily columnist. The same year he wrote three-quarters of History of the American Revolution, otherwise credited to Paul Allen. Neal's substantial literary output earned him the moniker from his Delphian Club associates. By these means he was able to pay his expenses while completing his apprenticeship and independently studying law. He was admitted to the bar and started practicing law in Baltimore in 1820. Neal's final years in Baltimore were his most productive as a novelist. He published one novel in 1822 and three more the following year, eventually rising to the status of James Fenimore Cooper's chief rival for recognition as America's leading novelist. In this turbulent period he quit the Delphian Club on bad terms and accepted excommunication from the Society of Friends after his participation in a street brawl. In reaction to insults against prominent lawyer William Pinkney published in Randolph just after Pinkney died, his son Edward Coote Pinkney challenged Neal to a duel. Having established himself six years earlier as an outspoken opponent of dueling, Neal refused and the two engaged in a battle of printed words in the fall of that year. Neal became "weary of the law—weary as death", feeling that he spent those years in "open war, with the whole tribe of lawyers in America". "Ironically,... at precisely the moment when [Neal] was endeavoring to establish himself as the American writer, Neal was also alienating friends, critics, and the general public at an alarming rate." By late 1823, Neal was ready to relocate away from Baltimore. According to him, the catalyst to move to London was a dinner party with an English friend who quoted Sydney Smith's 1820 then-notorious remark, "in the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?". Whether it had more to do with Smith or Pinkney, Neal took less than a month after that dinner date to settle his affairs in Baltimore and secure passage on a ship bound for the UK on December 15, 1823. Writing in London Neal's relocation to London figured into three professional goals that guided him through the 1820s: to supplant Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper as the leading American literary voice,