The Fight for "The Night": Resolving the Authorship Dispute over "The Night Before Christmas"

By Tom A. Jerman

Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"?

In The Fight for "The Night": Resolving the Authorship Dispute Over "The Night Before Christmas," author Tom A. Jerman addresses a challenge first voiced by descendants of a Poughkeepsie farmer, Henry Livingston Jr., and later articulated by Vassar Engli

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom A. Jerman
• Release date: Dec 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989205417

Tom A. Jerman

The author of The Fight for "The Night," Tom A. Jerman, turned to documenting the history of Santa Claus after a thirty-five year career as a lawyer with two large international law firms. Jerman's interest in Santa began in 1985 when he started collecting Santa Claus figurines and ornaments while he was still practicing law, eventually amassing a collection of almost five thousand Santas. Jerman began Santa Claus Worldwide: A History of St. Nicholas and Other Holiday Gift-Givers, his first book on the history of Santa Claus, after taking early retirement in 2015. This volume, published in 2020, documented the history of the world's midwinter gift-givers from the pagan gods who first served that role, to a Christian figure, St. Nicholas, who appeared in the Middle Ages, to a variety of "terror men" who succeeded the saint in Protestant regions following the Reformation. In America, Santa Claus first surfaced in two children's poems that were published in New York in 1821 and 1823: The Children's Friend. which created "Santeclaus" in 1821, and "A Visit from St. Nicholas," better known as "The Night Before Christmas," a poem published anonymously in 1823. In The Fight for "The Night," Jerman addresses the impact and authorship of that poem.

Book preview

Author’s Preface and Introduction

I started writing this book in 2015 after ending my 35-year career as a partner with two large international law firms. My original intent was to write a guide for existing or would-be collectors of Santa Claus figurines. I had been collecting Santa figurines for three decades, with a focus on exploring the wide breadth of ways in which artists and artisans depicted Santa, his predecessors, and his international counterparts. By the time of my retirement, I had accumulated more than 4,500 examples and wanted to learn more about identifying, dating, and valuing the figurines. Unfortunately, virtually all the collectors’ books I could find were outdated, inaccurate, or too limited in scope to be useful. I concluded, therefore, that I would do better by writing one myself.

Heck, I had undergraduate degrees in journalism and philosophy, a graduate degree in law, four years of experience as a copy editor on the largest daily newspaper in my home state of Utah, and 35 years of experience as what large law firms call litigators. In that role, I had written or edited hundreds of legal briefs and memoranda, multiple articles in scholarly journals, and the only treatise in my legal specialty. Although the goal of a litigator is to resolve legal disputes rather than document and evaluate past events as such, litigators employ essentially the same skills as historians, researching and analyzing the relevant facts and memorializing their conclusions in writing. A book about Santa figurines, I assumed, would be no sweat.

My plan was that the first chapter would be a brief history of what I called midwinter gift-givers—Santa Claus, his numerous European counterparts, and their pagan predecessors dating back several thousand years. I thought the reader should understand the difference, for example, between America’s Santa Claus and Russia’s Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) or between England’s Father Christmas and Germany’s Weihnachtsmann (Christmas Man). To document the history, I visited the Library of Congress, the American Antiquarian Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library, among others. I also bought all the books I could find on the subject, most of which I quickly learned could be purchased for a pittance—one cent plus $3.99 in shipping—as used books on Amazon, and I compiled a library on the history of Santa that ultimately measured some 40 linear feet. Undertaking this research, however, also meant that I was still working on the history of Santa more than two years later. In the meantime, the brief summary had grown to well over 200 pages, overshadowing the rest of the still-unfinished book. After discussions with my editor, I decided to put the idea of a collectors’ guide on hold and complete a stand-alone history of the world’s midwinter gift-givers. That book, Santa Claus Worldwide: A History of St. Nicholas and Other Holiday Gift-Bringers, was published in May 2020.¹

As I was working on the history, I learned of a new monograph—professor-speak for a short book—titled Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas? Analyzing the Clement Clarke Moore vs. Henry Livingston Question by MacDonald P. Jackson, an English professor emeritus at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a prominent authority on William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. Jackson’s monograph resurrected a long-standing argument over who wrote the originally untitled poem that came to be known as The Night Before Christmas (TNBC).² The question was of historical importance because the 56 lines, published anonymously in the Troy (N.Y.) Sentinel on December 23, 1823, under the headline Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,³ defined the appearance and demeanor of the chubby, jolly, white-bearded, fur-clad, soot-covered man named Sante Claus in ways that would stick.

The poem also defined the American practice in which Santa Claus would arrive on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, land on the roof, descend the chimney, and leave presents in stockings hung earlier in the evening, before ascending the chimney and moving on to the next house. It gradually became one of America’s best-loved poems, reprinted more than a thousand times over 200 years and changing the celebration of Christmas from a drunken, rowdy affair on Christmas Eve to a quiet, family-centered event on Christmas morning.⁴ Except for the arrival in 1939 of a young reindeer with a neon-red nose named Rudolph, virtually everything we know about Santa and his role in the celebration of Christmas was contained in that one poem from 1823. No other American author has had such substantial impact on how we celebrate the holiday.

The poem was reportedly delivered by a prominent Troy resident to Orville Holley, editor of the Troy Sentinel. Some say it was delivered by Harriet Butler, the daughter of Troy’s Episcopal minister, who heard the poem while spending Christmas 1822 at the Manhattan estate of Clement C. Moore. Others say it was delivered by Sarah Sackett, a Troy resident and friend of Butler, because Sackett’s husband ran a business next to the Sentinel offices. Within a decade, as the result of word of mouth and some fairly obvious hints at the author’s identity by Sentinel editor Holley, it was widely believed in Troy that the author was Moore, the only son of Benjamin Moore, the former president of Columbia College and Episcopal bishop of New York until his death in 1816. The younger Moore was an extremely wealthy, very religious, highly educated professor of Oriental and Greek literature at Manhattan’s General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church (GTS) who translated classical poetry from Hebrew, Latin, and Greek as part of his job and wrote original verse for his family and friends.

Despite the widespread belief among Moore’s friends and family; the residents of Troy, New York, where the poem was published; the students and faculty of GTS; and the literati of Manhattan known as the Knickerbockers that Moore was the author, Moore did not publicly disclose his authorship until 1836, when he authorized its publication under his name in The New-York Book of Poetry, a compilation designed to highlight the works of lesser-known New York poets.⁵ In 1844, prompted by a false claim of authorship by another writer, Moore asserted his authorship much more vigorously in a letter to a New York newspaper. The same year Moore included TNBC in Poems, a compilation of his own poetry,⁶ and the editor and publisher of the Troy Sentinel both asserted unequivocally that Moore was the author of TNBC.⁷

Over several decades, Moore also completed several holographic copies, including one obtained for the New-York Historical Society in 1862 by T.W.C. Moore, who, despite sharing Moore’s last name, was actually the cousin and next-door neighbor of Henry Livingston Jr. That version was accompanied by a letter in which T.W.C. Moore described an interview with Clement C. Moore in 1862 about when and how TNBC was written in 1822. In contrast, Livingston never claimed authorship at all, nor did the children who purportedly heard him read it on a Christmas morning somewhere between 1780 and 1808 ever say publicly that Livingston had written the poem. In other words, there were two people who knew with certainty who wrote the poem: Clement C. Moore, who published the poem in 1836 and 1844 under his own name, signed numerous copies, and consistently said that he wrote it, and Henry Livingston Jr., who never claimed authorship at all. Mystery solved. Case closed.

The irrefutable logic of these statements, however, did not dissuade a handful of Livingston descendants from conducting what has been called a Grail-like search over 40 years for the real poet. The first claim to Livingston’s authorship occurred in 1886 when Cornelia G. Goodrich, a great-great-granddaughter, argued to Benson J. Lossing, head of the Dutchess County Historical Society, that Livingston was the actual author. The evidence, she said, was the family lore handed down among Livingston’s descendants, all long since deceased, that Livingston read the poem to his children long before it was published in the Troy Sentinel. Lossing’s memorable retort—that [t]he circumstantial evidence that your G. G. Grandfather wrote ‘The Visit of St. Nicholas’ seems as conclusive as that which has taken innocent men to the gallows—seems to have dissuaded Goodrich from taking the claim public.⁸

As a result, it was not until 1899 that the Livingston descendants finally took the claim public, albeit in a soft whisper, and it was not actually a Livingston descendant but an employee of one who did so. In that year, Simon W. Cooper, editor of a Long Island newspaper that had been owned for 30 years by one of Livingston’s grandsons, also named Henry Livingston, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun asking why it had published a letter on December 27, 1899, attributing TNBC to Moore.⁹ In a published response, the editor of the Sun wrote dismissively—but accurately—that Moore’s title to the authorship of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ is founded on his own claim and the general acceptance of it for nearly a century.¹⁰

In response to the repeated reaction that the Livingstons lacked evidence to support their contention, William Sturgis Thomas, a great-grandson born in 1871, began collecting statements from other descendants recounting what they reportedly had been told by their grandparents, great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents about Livingston’s role. This produced approximately 30 handwritten statements by 10 of Livingston’s 400 or so descendants, with the vast majority from just four descendants who were four generations removed from the alleged reading by Livingston to his children.¹¹ Moreover, all of the letters amounted to something like my grandmother told me that her grandmother told her that our great-great-grandfather Henry Livingston Jr. wrote TNBC in 1808 except that none of them cited the year 1808. The witness letters—and Thomas’s acquaintance with Winthrop P. Tryon, a writer for the Christian Science Monitor—invigorated the authorship dispute, prompting publication of two magazine articles in 1920, one by Tryon in the Christian Science Monitor¹² and one by Henry Litchfield West in the Bookman, an Episcopal magazine.¹³

Over the next six decades, the dispute spawned more than a dozen other publications: a scholarly article by Berkeley professor Charles W. Jones, the nation’s leading specialist in St. Nicholas, in 1954;¹⁴ two articles by experts in children’s literature, one in 1983¹⁵ and one in 2001;¹⁶ biographies of Moore in 1897,¹⁷ 1933,¹⁸ and 1956;¹⁹ and a book about the authorship dispute in 1991.²⁰ All of these works concluded either that Moore wrote the poem or, at a minimum, that the Livingston advocates could not overcome the heavy burden of proof necessary to overturn an attribution that has stood unchallenged for a century or more. And then along came Mary . . . .

In the face of consistent rejection of the Livingston position, the dispute lay dormant until 1999, when Mary Van Deusen, a great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Henry Livingston Jr. and a particularly aggressive advocate for the Livingston claim, asked a Vassar College English professor, Don Foster, to include a chapter on the authorship of TNBC in Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous, a book he was writing on his career as a self-proclaimed literary detective.²¹ Foster came to public attention in 1989 when he declared that a 1612 poem, Funeral Elegy by W.S., could have been the work of Shakespeare.²² In 1996, Foster went further, declaring unequivocally that Funeral Elegy was part of the Shakespeare canon. If Foster’s assertion were accurate, Funeral Elegy was the first addition to the Shakespeare canon in more than a century, and, accurate or not, the claim put Foster on the front page of the New York Times, a rare achievement for an English professor.²³

As a result of the fame generated by this announcement, Foster was able to remake himself as a literary detective, taking on both literary disputes and criminal cases at an hourly rate that was undoubtedly many times higher than what he earned as a Vassar professor. In marketing his services, Foster claimed he was uniquely able to determine the author of any writing based on a variety of personal attributes and linguistic markers, that he had a batting average of 100 percent in 152 cases, and that he had never made a mistake.²⁴ Unfortunately, many members of the media swallowed Foster’s claims with remarkable gullibility—in particular, the usually skeptical New York Times, which published cover stories parroting Foster’s claims in 1996 (the Shakespeare attribution) and 2000 (the Livingston attribution). Only a handful of scholars and journalists, such as University of Massachusetts historian Stephen Nissenbaum, questioned documents examiner Joe Nickell, and rare manuscripts dealer Seth Kaller, recognized that [t]ime and again Foster makes his case by misinterpreting, or altering, evidence.²⁵

More recently, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Justin Fox wrote more expansively that because Moore publicly claimed authorship in 1844, [m]aking the case for Livingston thus requires asserting that Moore was a liar but that Foster goes well beyond [the allegation of lying] to paint Moore as a dull, sneaky, intolerant, kid-hating reactionary—as well as, of course, an enslaver and champion of slavery. These attacks prompted Fox to conclude, as Kaller had 20 years earlier, that the many errors and misrepresentations I have found in Foster’s depiction of Moore’s biography and character [make it] hard for me to take his conclusions seriously.²⁶

Before MacDonald P. Jackson’s book Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas? arrived in my mailbox in 2016, I had concluded that Foster’s book was not worth more than a couple of paragraphs in Santa Claus Worldwide. For one thing, my book was about the history of Santa Claus and other midwinter gift-givers, not The Night Before Christmas, and while the poem was an important part of the history, creating the American depiction of Santa Claus and defining how Americans celebrated the holiday, the name on the cover was not. If one could magically change the author’s name on every copy of The Night Before Christmas from Clement C. Moore to Henry Livingston Jr., it would have no effect on the celebration of Christmas.

For another thing, the circumstances under which Foster had pronounced his opinion had changed substantially. In 2000, Foster was at the top of his game, at least if you didn’t pay any attention to his role in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case. In 1999, Foster accepted an engagement with the Boulder, Colorado, Police Department to determine who wrote a false ransom note found at the scene of JonBenét Ramsey’s murder, and he prepared a report stating with absolute certainty that the note was written by JonBenét’s mother, Patsy Ramsey. Unfortunately, Foster failed to disclose to the Boulder authorities that he had already made statements inconsistent with both his report and the neutrality required of an expert witness. Following the murder, Foster had taken to frequenting the internet chat rooms in which the murder was the prime topic of conversation and fingered the Ramseys’ oldest son as the killer.

More seriously, Foster had written a letter to JonBenét’s parents in 1997 saying that he was 100 percent certain of their innocence and could prove it if they would only hire him.²⁷ When the Boulder district attorney’s office discovered these communications, it terminated Foster’s engagement. In Author Unknown, Foster devoted two paragraphs to the Ramsey case, in which he sought to paint over his interactions with the Ramseys as an early bump in my learning curve.²⁸ In his 1997 letter to the Ramseys, however, Foster said nothing about his need for learning. Rather, he wrote that [i]n the 14 years that I have done scholarly textual analysis, I have never made a substantive error; . . . . In short, no one does what I do as well as I do it.²⁹ Although Foster had reportedly proclaimed in July 1998 that [a]ll I need to do is get one attribution wrong ever, and it will discredit me,³⁰ he proceeded with the engagements described below as if his only mistake had been the equivalent of belching in public.

Two years after publication of Author Unknown, Foster was forced to concede that the crown jewel of his reputation in authorship attribution—his identification of Funeral Elegy by W.S. as the first addition to the Shakespeare canon in more than a century—was inaccurate.³¹ Not only did this eliminate from his résumé his most significant accomplishment as a Shakespeare scholar, but also it opened him up to attacks by all those Shakespeare scholars who resented Foster’s boorish behavior when he was king of the hill. Five years later, yet another gumshoe dropped when Foster, Vassar College, and Vanity Fair magazine were forced to settle a libel lawsuit filed by Stephen Hatfill, a government anthrax researcher who was cleared of any culpability in the 2001 anthrax attacks after an accusatory article by Foster was published in Vanity Fair magazine.³² Following the settlement, Foster reportedly retired from his career as a literary detective.

Foster’s withdrawal from this line of work, however, did nothing to correct the allegations he had already made, and Author Unknown continues to feed the narrative that Henry Livingston Jr., not Clement C. Moore, wrote TNBC. As noted above, I had already concluded when Jackson published Who Wrote TNBC? that there was more than enough objective evidence to undermine Foster’s position on the merits. The Livingston descendants had tried to revive the authorship dispute every 20 years or so since 1886, and except for Author Unknown, where Foster had a strong incentive to attribute the poem to Livingston because an attribution to Moore would have produced nothing but yawns, the Livingston advocates had failed every time.

One of the flaws is that the witness letters are plainly hearsay—neither Livingston nor the children who purportedly heard him recite the poem in 1808 had ever said publicly that Livingston wrote TNBC. The Livingston position that TNBC was written in 1808 also ignores that the poem included obvious allusions to works published in 1812 and 1821 and therefore could not have been written before 1821. One such work was the 1812 edition of A History of New York, a historical satire in which author Washington Irving described a cloud of smoke from St. Nicholas’s pipe circling his head before the saint placed a finger aside his nose and ascended into the sky—a scene that appears virtually word for word in TNBC.³³ The other was The Children’s Friend, an 1821 booklet that told exactly the same story as TNBC, including two unique elements, traveling on a sleigh pulled by a flying reindeer and the gift-giver’s arrival on Christmas Eve instead of St. Nicholas Day.³⁴ While Foster argues that a Livingston poem written in 1808 included elements from a booklet written in 1821 because Clement C. Moore actually wrote The Children’s Friend—an argument that makes less sense than the plot of the 1964 film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians³⁵—he does not even attempt to explain how an 1808 poem included an allusion to a book written in 1812, presumably realizing that nothing any literary detective could say would change the facts.

Moreover, as many of the rebuttals to Author Unknown have asserted, Foster’s position was based largely on baseless personal attacks designed to make the reader loathe Moore—attacks he coupled with utterly indefensible historical arguments like proclaiming that Moore’s Episcopal faith forbade the celebration of Christmas and Livingston’s Dutch Reformed faith promoted it, whereas just the opposite was true. Foster’s skill as a writer, however, was such that even without historical, biographical, stylistic, or statistical evidence of Livingston’s authorship, he could combine his notable writing skills with bits and pieces of Moore’s poems and letters and an occasional historical citation to paint Moore as a liar, a thief, and a man of dubious character. In taking this approach, Foster was following the strategy described by Harold Love, a prominent Australian expert who wrote in Attributing Authorship: An Introduction that as a routine move in authorship disputes, the character of the disfavored author has systematically to be blackened: he must be branded as deceptive, unscrupulous, a plagiarist, violent, mercenary and ignorant.³⁶ In Author Unknown, Foster accused Moore and his friends and family of all of these traits even though Moore’s contemporaries consistently identified Moore as a man of the highest character.

Foster was also adept at mischaracterizing or ignoring facts that were inconsistent with his position. For example, Foster claimed that although he initially believed Livingston wrote nothing after 1794, his review in 1999 of the Thomas Collection, compiled by William Sturgis Thomas, his son, and his grandson, showed that Livingston actually wrote and published poetry more or less continuously from the 1770s until just before his death in 1828. The truth, however, was that even including all of the poems in the Thomas Collection, almost all of Livingston’s 42 poems were written between 1783 and 1793, the decade between his two marriages. In Foster’s world, therefore, the phrase more or less continuously includes two gaps of 20-plus years.

Although Jackson adopted some of Foster’s conclusions, Jackson’s monograph could not be dismissed as easily as Author Unknown for several reasons. For one thing, Jackson was a modest but widely respected Shakespearean scholar in his eighties who had written or edited more than a dozen books on the attribution of Elizabethan literature, whereas Foster specialized in personal attacks and was anything but modest. For another, Jackson largely ignored Foster’s questionable personality profile of Moore, instead performing what Jackson called stylistic and statistical analyses of Moore’s and Livingston’s poems. Following publication of Jackson’s book, it also became increasingly clear that the two books were having their intended effect on public opinion. For example, in the Bloomberg Opinion article discussed above, Justin Fox ultimately concludes that Foster’s consistent misrepresentations required a verdict in favor of Moore, but in the course of discussion observes that Moore’s star was losing luster every year.

Of more serious concern, a website known as PoetryFoundation.org asserts that authorship of TNBC is typically attibuted [sic] now to Major Henry Livingston, Jr., whose great-grandson spent many years trying to establish Major Livingston as the author,³⁷ whereas several other poetry websites credit Moore as author of The Children’s Friend, which they typically call Olde Santeclaus, clear evidence that some readers were crediting Foster’s and Jackson’s allegations.³⁸ While these assertions are clearly erroneous—PoetryFoundation.org, for example, states that The New-York Book of Poetry (1837) lists the author of A Visit from St. Nicholas as anonymous when the book actually lists Moore as author—the mistaken attributions and personal attacks are plainly having a corrosive effect on Moore’s reputation. Taking a cue from Foster’s observation in Author Unknown that any challenge to his attribution of Funeral Elegy by W.S. would require a systematic dismantling of the attribution rather than merely nibbling around its edges,³⁹ I recognized that any challenge to the Livingston attribution would require the same comprehensive treatment. Therefore, I concluded, I would have to deal with both Foster’s and Jackson’s books, and that, in turn, would require an explanation of how statistical and stylistic analyses of authorship are conducted and why Jackson’s analyses were invalid.

It should be emphasized that Jackson’s monograph had to be addressed not because he was right—he wasn’t—but because his personal reputation was impeccable and his methodology so unusual that there was nothing simple I could cite for the proposition that it was all malarkey. If readers did not understand Jackson’s analyses—and I don’t know how anyone could, given his bizarre methodology—there was a danger that they would simply accept Jackson’s position because of his reputation. Accordingly, I sought to learn more about the principles of authorship attribution and the historical, biographical, stylistic, and statistical evidence that Moore or Livingston authored TNBC. That process took a couple of years, resulting in a story that was far too long to fit within a history of Santa Claus. Once again, therefore, I was forced to excise the body from the growth, and this book is the result.

Paradoxically, the question of who wrote TNBC does not really alter the history of Christmas, or even of Santa Claus, that much. It is the poem itself, not the name of the author, that was responsible for popularizing and standardizing our annual Christmas rituals. Indeed, most earlier publications, and many later ones, do not identify any author at all. The question of who wrote the poem is important as a matter of getting the history right, however, and of giving the publisher and illustrator of The Children’s Friend and the author of TNBC the literary credit that is their due. I hope that laying out the irrefutable evidence of Moore’s authorship in one place, and providing a complete refutation of the arguments the Livingston advocates have made over 135 years, will end the dispute, once and for all, and that no one will have to say again there is a dispute over who wrote The Night Before Christmas.

Chapter 1

A Brief History of The Night Before Christmas

This is the story of a literary prize fight. Because the Thrilla in Manila was already taken, I have chosen another alliterative title, The Fight for ‘The Night.’ The purse is public credit for having written the untitled poem that was initially named Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas and, several decades later, came to be known as The Night Before Christmas. The fighters on the card are Clement C. Moore, a well-bred, well-educated, and wealthy professor of Oriental and Greek literature at General Theological Seminary (GTS) in New York City; and Henry Livingston Jr., a farmer, surveyor, and petty government official in Poughkeepsie, New York. Because Livingston died in 1828 and Moore died in 1863, The Fight for ‘The Night’ must be carried out by proxy. A group of Livingston’s descendants, led by his great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Mary Van Deusen, and two college English professors, Donald Foster, PhD, and MacDonald P. Jackson, both of whom have written books on the dispute, will be representing Livingston. I will articulate the Moore position.

The Birth of America’s Favorite Christmas Poem

America’s favorite Christmas poem was born on December 24, 1822, in the living room of an opulent manor on a large estate named Chelsea in southern Manhattan. On that night before Christmas, Clement C. Moore read the poem to his wife and children and various friends and family members who were spending Christmas Eve with the Moore family. Oddly, given the dispute that has raged for well over a century about whether Moore wrote the poem, there is no disagreement that Moore read the poem at Chelsea on December 24, 1822, a year before it was published in a Troy, New York, newspaper, and that someone—most credit Harriet Butler, the daughter of Rev. David Butler, minister of the Troy Episcopal Church, or Sarah Sackett, a close friend of Moore—obtained a copy and delivered it anonymously, or had a friend deliver it, to Orville Holley, editor of the Troy (NY) Sentinel, where it was published anonymously the following Christmas. There is no evidence that Henry Livingston Jr. ever even saw or heard the poem.

The three authors who have written in support of the Livingston attribution—Foster, Jackson, and Van Deusen—contend that the poem was either stolen by, or given to, Moore sometime between 1808 and 1822, and Moore read it to a group of family and friends on Christmas Eve in 1822. The Livingstons and their advocates cannot credibly explain when, why, or how it was stolen, however, or who participated in the theft, or even whether it was a theft or an accidental delivery to Moore’s house; nor can they explain the 14-year delay between Livingston’s alleged authorship in 1808 and Moore’s reading of the poem in 1822, or where the purloined poem sat during those 14 years, or what prompted Moore to read a poem that seems to have appeared magically on his desk.

Several witness statements by members of the Livingston family claim there was documentary evidence, such as copies of the poem, in the possession of one Livingston child or another, but none of these documents has ever surfaced. Similarly, there are witness statements that assert that a governess employed by the Livingstons went to work for Moore with a copy of the poem in 1808 and that the poem was destroyed in a house fire of uncertain place and date but these explanations have been debunked on the bases that Moore did not have any children until 1815, and thus had no need to hire a nanny, and that a complete, unburned copy of Livingston’s manuscript book turned up in the possession of Livingston’s youngest daughter, Susan, who incidentally said in her witness letter she had no knowledge of Livingston writing the poem.

It should be emphasized that the Livingston family for our purposes does not mean the numerous descendants of Robert Livingston the Elder, First Lord of the Manor (1654–1728), a group of wealthy and prominent citizens that included successful businessmen, attorneys, judges, and scores of politicians—governors, senators, congressmen, mayors, and two presidents, both named George Bush. Rather, it means fewer than a dozen largely unknown descendants who collectively wrote about 30 so-called witness letters, mostly between 1917 and 1920, attesting to Livingston’s authorship based solely on century-old family lore that Livingston wrote the poem and read it to his family in Poughkeepsie on Christmas morning in the early 1800s. With one exception, the witness letters place the reading between 1800 and 1805, but for reasons never explained the Livingston descendants currently place the reading in 1808, and that date has prevailed in the Foster and Jackson books. Because the precise year in which Livingston allegedly read the poem to his children is not especially important, I will use 1808 in this book as well.

The small group of descendants who wrote the Livingston witness letters a century ago was seemingly convinced that Livingston wrote the poem in or about 1808 and that it was somehow conveyed to Chelsea, where Moore read it in 1822. Once the poem arrived in Chelsea, they say, it could have been delivered to Troy in the same manner that Moore’s poem was delivered to Orville Holley, editor of the Troy Sentinel, a position that avoids the need to be too specific about how the poem made the 160-mile trip. They even allow for the possibility that the attribution to Moore was the result of a miscommunication between one of Moore’s guests, who said the poem was from the Moore house, and Holley, who interpreted the statement to mean written by Moore. This explanation, however, ignores that Holley’s recollection, reduced to writing in 1829, was that he did not know whom the author was—or, presumably, where the author lived—when he first received the poem in 1823 but learned whom the author was a few months later, a statement that would preclude the conclusion that Holley confused Clement Moore with his house, Chelsea.

One of the few pieces of evidence that purported to describe how Harriett Butler obtained the poem she provided to the Sentinel is a December 23, 1871, letter by a longtime Troy resident, John T. Parker, to the Troy Daily Times.

Presuming you will publish, as usual, the Visit of St. Nicholas, quoted above, I send you the enclosed history of it for the benefit of the young Trojans who sleep with one eye open on the night before Christmas. As it has a Trojan birth, it may interest even the editor to hear its narrative as related by me. In the year 1825 I think [1822, actually], the eldest daughter of Rev. David Butler, first rector of St. Paul’s church, Miss Harriet Butler, on a visit to Prof. Clement C. Moore of Columbia College, New York, found on the centre table this Visit of St. Nicholas, composed by the Professor for his children. Miss B. brought it to Troy with her, and gave a copy of it to O. L. Holley, the editor of the Troy Sentinel, published by Norman Tuttle. It took like wildfire, and was copied through the state. The Troy Sentinel printed it for the news boys for several years on Christmas day. Myron King executed a beautiful wood cut, representing St. Nicholas on his sleigh, drawn by six reindeer prancing up a steep house-top, and entering the chimney with his presents.

While there are questions about the accuracy of Parker’s letter, there is no dispute that Holley published the anonymous poem on December 23, 1823, giving it the title Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas. The title was quickly shortened to A Visit from St. Nicholas, and over several decades, as Santa Claus overshadowed St. Nicholas, Kriss Kringle, and Belsnickle as the American gift-giver of choice, the poem became better known as The Night Before Christmas. Other than Holley’s statement that he had learned the author was Clement C. Moore a few months after he received and published the poem, the answers to when and how Holley learned of the author’s identity are uncertain. On January 20, 1829, in response to another paper’s request for information about the author, Holley wrote an article in the Sentinel describing the author as a resident of New York City and "a gentleman of more merit as a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions,"⁴⁰ a hint in which the unnecessary use of the word more twice in one sentence, and the even more unnecessary italics on the first use, was an unmistakable clue to Moore’s authorship.

Moreover, on February 20, 1824, only two months after publication of TNBC, Holley published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel another poem, Lines Written after a Snow-Storm, that was also published under Moore’s name in his 1844 book, Poems. Despite the similar timing and similar circumstances under which the two poems were published, none of the Livingston advocates has ever questioned Moore’s authorship of Lines, and it is plausible that Moore delivered Lines to Holley himself in the course of conversations about the author of TNBC.

TNBC has been edited in a variety of ways since its original publication on December 23, 1823, primarily for spelling and grammar. Most of the changes involve the use of commas, semicolons, dashes, and exclamation marks, which early printers used with reckless abandon. The most discussed change has been the names of the last two reindeer, originally published in 1823 as Dunder and Blixem, although no one knows for sure whether those were Moore’s words or the work of a delivery person or an editor. The two names were changed to Donder and Blixen by either Moore or editor Charles Fenno Hoffman in the 1837 poetry compilation The New-York Book of Poetry.⁴¹ In 1844, in anticipation of the publication of Poems, a compilation of Moore’s poetry, Moore changed the name of Blixem to Blitzen so that it rhymed with Vixen and made a couple of other small changes to perfect the meter.⁴² The reindeer now are often called, incorrectly, Donner and Blitzen, and one of the more humorous reviews of a recent version of the poem on Amazon.com says, I’ve given it 4 stars because there’s a typo . . . ‘Donder’ instead of Donner . . . annoying and makes you wonder why proofreaders get paid.

The following is the version printed in Poems, the only version where we know that Moore personally reviewed and corrected the text before publication. The reader should notice that following the 1844 edits, the meter (anapestic tetrameter) and rhymes are perfect, something that Van Deusen says Livingston never accomplished in a collection of his much shorter poems.

A Visit from St. Nicholas

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And Mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,

Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap;

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a