Waiting in the wings for ancestor Henry Livingston Jr. to be acclaimed as the classic Christmas poem’s real author is descendant Mary Van Deusen. She is joined by a handful of scholars who helped in a decade-long research effort. to prove authorship of the poem titled "A Visit from St. Nicholas, but popularly known by its first line, "Twas the Night before Christmas." This was at least the fourth attempt in more than 125 years by Livingston’s kin to prove he authored the poem which first appeared anonymously in a New York newspaper Dec. 23, 1823. This time Mary is armed with more than family tradition.
Clement Moore vs. Henry Livingston
The players:
- Clement Moore, who attached his name to the poem many years after it first appeared and following numerous reprints. Moore, a classical scholar, was a professor at Columbia University and General Theological Seminary, which he helped establish. He was against abolishing slavery, fought urban expansion in New York City and wrote poetry.
- Henry Livingston Jr., 20 years Moore’s senior, and a Revolutionary War soldier, judge, surveyor and gentleman farmer who lost a toddler son, was widowed at a young age, but remarried 10 years later and reared a large family. He wrote poetry.
Both men had published anonymous and signed poems. Livingston's are those of an empathetic man who knows how children think. Moore's tend to take a moralistic tone.
Revising a Christmas Legend
Vassar Professor Don Foster, an expert in textual content analysis, agreed to help, if Mary could do some of the spade work. She was, he said, starting at a disadvantage because Moore’s name had been attached to the poem for more than 150 years. The to-do list was formidable:
- Find handwriting samples for both men
- Locate and search roughly 50 years of newspapers in the New York City region, looking for other poems by both men and related information
- Find or prepare a bibliography for Moore
- Assemble and verify content of the family legends and memorabilia that had previously been used to assert Livingston’s authorship
- Search multiple library and historical society archives, as well as museum holdings, for old letters, diaries and journals that would provide information on the activities of both men
- Look for genealogical records and other items that might reveal connections between the two men
- Search for the missing manuscript of a New Year’s poem believed to have been written by Livingston
The Evidence
More circumstantial evidence was uncovered, but this time around there were some hard facts and other readily interpreted evidence, including:
- In 1773, Henry Livingston wished his fiancee a "Happy Christmas", a phrase whose first publication occurs in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel's" A Visit from St. Nicholas".
- In 1787, Henry published his first New Year's poem in a newspaper. It included these two lines: "But now the end of all this clatter/Is but a small and trifling matter."
- In 1803, author Washington Irving noted in his diary he was visiting Judge Joinas Platt, Henry’s brother-in-law. (It had been suggested that Clement Moore based his work on an 1809 Christmas story by Irving, but it now appears that Irving’s tale was inspired by Livingston’s poem.)
- It has been passed down in multiple lines of descent from Livingston that Henry first read the famous Christmas poem to some of his own children, perhaps as early as 1807. (Henry had been publishing poems since the 1870s; Moore’s earliest known poem is much later.)
- Henry’s 1819 “New Year’s Address” contains these lines: "But hark what a clatter/The jolly bells ringing/The lads and lasses so jovially singing,"
- In 1837, a friend of Moore put Moore’s name on the poem
- The 1823 poem is republished and edited several times, but by the 1830s-1840s, Henry’s children are reading the original version to their children.
- In 1844, Moore asks the Troy Sentinel publisher if he knew who wrote the poem published in 1823. He doesn’t and in his response includes his much-edited 1830 version, which Moore puts in his own book of poems, naming himself as author. Moore apparently didn't know the difference between the 1823 and 1844 versions of "his” poem.
- Livingston descendants claim Henry’s ownership several times in print, but the claim is ignored.
- In the 1970s, a first day Christmas stamp cover gives Henry Livingston as author of the famous poem, but thiz claim is soon forgotten.
- In 2000 expert Don Foster, working with Mary Van Deusen, found preliminary evidence which convinced him that Livingston could well be the author. A professional evaluation of the 1823 version of the poem, and of poems by Livingston and Moore, convinced him that Livingston was the author. Only Livingston’s poems utilized the reversed dactyl, common in childrens' stories. It is also a sort of sing-song cadence which is how children sometimes talk or sing about things which interest them. It was Don who discovered the letter in which Moore asked if the original publisher of the poem knew the author.
- Since 2000, other scholars have used or recognized the results of recent technology which analyzes works in order to establish authorship.
An Important Mystery Remains
It is known that the poem, as first published in 1823, was taken from Moore’s home to the newspaper which ran it. If Livingston wrote the poem, how did it get to Moore’s house? There are two known possibilities, neither of them fully documented:
- A governess visiting the Livingstons at Christmas asked for a copy of the poem and left it with Clement Moore, whom she visited enroute to work for a Moore family “down south".
- Henry's first cousin, who lived near him, married a relative of Clement Moore.. She likely visited both men many times
Recognition of Livingston as the Author
One of the crowning moments for Mary and other Livingston relatives who joined the search was the publication, for the 2011 Christmas season, of a new edition of “Twas the Night before Christmas”. Prominently displayed on the cover is the author’s name: Henry B. Livingston Jr. Fittingly, the publisher is St. Nicholas Press of Freeport, Maine.
Source:
Website of Mary Van Deusen and the various documents, poems, opinions and conclusions it cites; retrieved Dec. 5, 2011
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Rosemary E. Bachelor - Rosemary Bachelor, a prize-winning journalist, has had a career as an editor, feature writer, magazine publisher and author. Her latest ...
