Las Vegas Review of Books

200 Years of “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

When nineteenth-century American poetry is taught in school, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are usually the featured authors. (Just think of the movie Dead Poets Society.) Maybe Poe, or Longfellow, or Emerson makes an appearance. But the most famous and enduring nineteenth-century American verses were written by minor poets without any modern celebrity.

“Defence of Fort M’Henry” (1814), by Francis Scott Key, became “The Star-Spangled Banner,” our national anthem. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was written by Sarah Josepha Hale in 1830—and became the first sound ever recorded by Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877. Lydia Maria Child’s “New England Boy’s Song” (1844) is the one that goes, “Over the river and through the woods….” And “The New Colossus” (1883), a sonnet by Emma Lazarus, graces the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

But the most famous poem of them all first appeared exactly 200 years ago, in the December 23, 1823, issue of upstate New York’s Troy Sentinel newspaper. The column heading read, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” though the poem is now better known by its iconic opener: “’Twas the night before Christmas.” (Heck, all you really need to identify it nowadays is that very first word.)

The original is really no different than the poem we know today, though Donner and Blitzen are called “Dunder and Blixem.” The newspaper prefaced the verses with a short paragraph declaring that the author of this poem about “Sante Claus” [sic] was unknown—a holiday mystery.

The way the story typically goes, Orville L. Holley, the editor of the newspaper, received the poem from Harriet Butler (or maybe her neighbor Sarah Sackett?), who in turn had, without his knowledge, taken it from Clement C. Moore, a family friend who originally wrote “A Visit” one year earlier—Christmas Eve of 1822—for his children, perhaps during an afternoon sleigh ride. Moore was no local jingle man. He lived in New York City (he owned a large portion of what is today the Chelsea neighborhood), where he worked as a theological professor of biblical studies and classical literature. He was known for his two-volume Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language (1809). Though Moore is now usually credited as the author of the poem, it was only attributed to him years after its initial publication.

“A Visit from St. Nicholas” was a hit. It was popularly reprinted annually in periodicals and almanacs—appearing, for example, in the Philadelphia magazine The Casket in 1826. In the 1830s, Moore started receiving credit. He was first attributed as the author in 1837, by the editor Charles Fenno Hoffman, who included the poem in his New York Book of Poetry. Moore was credited again, by William Cullen Bryant, in the 1840 anthology Selections from the American Poets. And then, in 1844, when he was in his sixties, Moore publicly acknowledged his authorship by including “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in his Poems, a collection of verses he had written over the years. By this time, the Christmas poem was widely known. In fact, “A Visit,” along with some writings by Moore’s New York friend Washington Irving, had greatly helped to popularize the Christmas holiday in the United States by linking it to Dutch folklore. (The Puritans of colonial New England were no fans of yuletide shenanigans. For Protestant Christian Americans in the early years of the republic, December 25th wasn’t an especially significant date on the calendar.) After Moore’s death, in 1863, he was hailed as the “Poet of Christmas Eve,” a night he had made famous.

But by the beginning of the twentieth century, doubts circulated regarding Moore’s authorship. Another candidate, Henry Livingston of Poughkeepsie, emerged as a possible creator of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Livingston was a Revolutionary War veteran who occasionally wrote poetry for periodical publication and who died in 1828. Years later, several of his descendants insisted that, according to family tradition, Livingston wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” for his own children as early as 1808 and possibly even placed it in an obscure newspaper. They also claimed that one of Livingston’s daughters had possessed the original manuscript—but that it was burned up when her house caught fire in Wisconsin in the 1860s.

The poem has come to mean far more than the poet.

By the 1910s, the grandchildren of Moore and Livingston were arguing in print about the poem’s proper attribution. The controversy was amplified in 1920 by the journalist Henry Litchfield West, who suggested that a stylistic investigation supported the case for Livingston. Livingston favored anapestic verses (ta-ta-TUM, ta-ta-TUM), whereas Moore tended to write iambic poetry (ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM). “’Twas the Night before Christmas” is anapestic. In short, “A Visit” reads more like Livingston’s other poems than like Moore’s other poems. But does that mean Moore didn’t write it?

The controversy has attracted attention ever since. (It was even recently enshrined in a Hallmark movie, ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, which features a theatrical courtroom adjudication.) Those who wish to dig into the details should consult Who Wrote “The Night Before Christmas?” (2016), by Macdonald P. Jackson, a retired English professor from New Zealand. Here (and in a follow-up article) Jackson performs a sophisticated lexical analysis of both Livingston’s and Moore’s vocabulary and style, examining high-frequency words and “phoneme pairs” in their work. He concludes that “the internal evidence is unequivocal”: Livingston wrote the poem. (“Livingston’s work, like ‘Visit,’ is informed by a lively imagination, a vein of whimsy, and an energizing gusto that are absent from Moore’s.”) The external evidence, however, remains inconclusive, so those who prefer to keep calling Moore the Poet of Christmas Eve can do so without dishonesty.

For most people, of course, it simply doesn’t matter. Livingston and Moore each wrote many other poems, and no one cares about any of them. As with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the poem has come to mean far more than the poet. Like the mysterious jolly old elf himself, the New York author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” labored silently (“He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work”), and the resulting gift is perhaps enhanced by its mysterious origins.