A Christmas Eve Manuscript Mystery
The Quiet Reader considers the case of Dunder, Blixem, and "The Night Before Christmas"
December’s “A Book for You” post is dropping down your chimney two days early so as not to interfere with anyone’s long winter’s nap. Read about the contested authorship of “The Night Before Christmas” below, and listen to my reading of the 1823 (first known) version of the poem in the voiceover (beginning at 1:34). I recommend taking the two parts in that order.
Special thanks to and , participants in ’s Headline Hub whose suggestions to emphasize “mystery” in today’s story set me on the path of this title.1
I am eager to hear your dim speculations and settled convictions about the authorship of “The Night Before Christmas” in the Comment section below! To see the comments and the full post, click the title above and read in a web browser.
Some classic book and author names belong together like two halves of a shell: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Howl by Allen Ginsberg. But can you name the author of the famous poem that begins
'Twas the night before Christmas,
when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse?
You may know the author as Clement C. Moore (1779-1863), a nineteenth-century professor of Biblical Learning in New York City, and the person whose name has been attached to the poem since 1837.2
Not long before Moore’s death in 1863, however, a rival claim emerged from eighty miles up the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie. The family of the late farmer and surveyor Henry Livingston, Jr., (1748-1828) claimed that he wrote the poem and started reading it to his children around 1807 or 1808. The family only became aware that someone else’s name was circulating on their father and grandfather’s poem, they said, when an illustrated version of it reached the family, either an 1848 book or Thomas Nast’s version that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1861.3
The case has attracted the attention of diligent scholars, most frustrated by lack of material evidence. However, in the last thirty years, two scholars have come to the separate conclusion that the style and linguistic patterns point to Livingston, not Moore. On the other hand, a manuscript dealer and a historian of Christmas stand firmly with Moore. The latest printing of the poem, a 2023 hand-sewn, keepsake edition lushly illustrated by Substacker
and published by the Folio Society follows the tradition of most publishers, attributing the poem to Moore.It is worth a longer post this week to let you evaluate some of the best evidence for yourself.
The Case for Moore of Manhattan
The scholars who stand by Clement Moore point out that the professor published the poem, while the farmer did not. Moore, the son of an Episcopal bishop and wealthy descendant of English colonial families publicly declared that he wrote the poem for his children around 1822-1823, so it is unjust, say his defenders, to smear his good name without strong evidence. The burden of proof is on the Livingston claimants.4
In Stephen Nissenbaum’s history of the Christmas holiday, the poem marks a pivot in the meaning of Christmas in the early 1800s. If Moore wrote the poem, as Nissenbaum accepts, then we can credit him with helping to change the character of St. Nicholas from a saint doling out punishments and rewards5 to a “jolly old elf” with eight reindeer to haul his abundance of gifts. Nissenbaum explains why patrician landowners of Moore’s socioeconomic class were ready for a new meaning of Christmas by the 1820s. In a big city, the old traditions of carousing and open-handed gift-giving were getting to be too much for the propertied class, who preferred to give gifts to children in their families rather than anyone who came to the door.
(Substacker
of interviewed Nissenbaum on this research and shared it in an informative post last year, reposted last week. I recommend it for a brief history of the Christmas holiday in the U.S.)The Case for Livingston of Locust Grove
Major Henry Livingston, Jr., another scion of prominent colonial families, Dutch and Scots rather than English, was remembered by his children as something of a jolly old elf himself. Livingston was a surveyor who illustrated his maps with doodles and drawings as well as a farmer on family land near Poughkeepsie. His letters reveal a frolicsome temperament and holiday traditions that included feasting and jesting with siblings and cousins. Livingston wrote poetry in many styles, including humorous verses in the anapestic meter of “The Night Before Christmas” (da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM).
Some time around 1860, when a member of the Livingston family saw “The Night Before Christmas” circulating as an illustrated book or in Harper’s Weekly magazine, attributed to Clement Moore, Henry’s daughter-in-law, in her sixties, told her daughter and granddaughter that the author’s name was incorrect. Eliza Clement Brewer Livingston (1798-1878) had grown up next door to the Livingstons, visited often, and married a Livingston son, Charles (1794-1847). As a girl, she had heard Henry read a Christmas poem he had written for his children. Eliza’s granddaughter later recorded what she remembered her grandmother saying: “ ‘Some one has made a mistake- Clement Moore did not write the ‘Night Before Christmas.’ Your grandfather Henry Livingston wrote it.” As granddaughter Jeanne repeated to a cousin in a letter of 1918, “My grandmother has repeatedly told me all about it - and of having heard it read by Major Henry himself as by himself.” Four branches of the family exchanged letters and memories throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to find out if anyone could prove the story.
As Don Foster points out in Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous, family stories are no basis for calling another man a liar. Anecdotes shared by Livingston grandchildren (that Henry’s children found the original manuscript in his desk when he died, and it was lost in a house fire in Wisconsin in 1854; that a governess heard the poem in the Livingston house and carried it with her when she went next to the Moore home; that Henry wore a nightcap and his second wife Jane wore a kerchief; that he kept horses named Dunder and Blixem at his Hudson River estate called Locust Grove) were not enough.
So Foster gave a close reading to Livingston and Moore’s respective poems, finding that “The Night Before Christmas” was written overwhelmingly in Livingston’s style, not Moore’s. A linguist, MacDonald P. Jackson, put the poems of each man through a more technical analysis — which sound-patterns within the words and lines were characteristic of each poet — and he, too, found the verbal evidence favored Livingston.
Areas of Agreement
No one doubts that the poem’s first known publication was anonymous, in the Troy Sentinel, on Christmas 1823. (The Livingston family thought there was an earlier publication, though two descendants and Don Foster looked and could not find it.) No one doubts that the poem was delivered to editors in Troy by a friend who had copied the poem in the Moore household. The Museum of the City of New York holds the 1844 letter from the publisher of the Troy Sentinel to Clement Moore attesting that he did not know who wrote the Christmas poem when he first printed it in 1823, but he had “since been informed that you [Moore] were the author.”
The poem began to appear with Moore’s name when a friend of his edited an anthology of New York City poetry in 1837. (See “Revisiting ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas,’” New York State Library, December 2014.) After Moore wrote to the Troy Sentinel proprietor to find out what he knew about the poem’s history in February 1844, Moore himself included the poem in a book of Poems he published later that year. Both the Livingston and Moore children believed their father had written the poem (c. 1808 and c. 1822), though no original composition survives.
Why Bother with the Livingston Claim?
The break for the Livingston family came a century ago with the discovery of Henry Livingston’s manuscript book of poems, thought to have been lost. In 1920, a Christian Science Monitor writer compared Livingston’s verse with Clement Moore’s published poems. One-third of the poems in Livingston’s manuscript book were composed in the same meter as “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” many of them humorous or bantering, while only one other poem in Moore’s published volume was composed in the same meter, and it was “a laborious effort at fun” in which “wit, fancy and imagination” were “sadly” “dismembered and cast into the tub.” Moore’s poetic character was chiefly “studious” and “moralizing.” He worked best in stately iambic verse, with no evidence of skill (besides “The Night Before Christmas”) at jaunty anapests.
Livingston signed a verse letter to his brother,
If it suits your convenience remit if you please
To my good brother Paul an embrace & a squeeze. (1786 Letter from HL to My Brother Beekman)
Light anapests and joy in the family were typical of Livingston’s verse but uncharacteristic of Moore.
From the author of “The Night Before Christmas,” would you expect the following lines in a contemporary poem called “From Saint Nicholas” — a letter from the saint to a child?
But, speaking of crying, I’m sorry to say
Your screeches and screams, so loud ev’ry day
Were near driving me and my goodies away.
Good children I always give good things in plenty;
How sad to have left your stocking quite empty . . . (“From Saint Nicholas,” Manuscript in in possession of The Museum of the City of New York)
As Nissenbaum puts it in his study of New York City Christmases past, “The Night Before Christmas” changed the character of Saint Nicholas from an authoritative figure doling out punishments and rewards to a “jolly,” “declassed” presider over “Christmas without the prospect of judgment” (p. 78). There is no evidence in Clement Moore’s poetry — except the uncharacteristic “Night Before Christmas” — that a Christmas without judgment ever occurred to him. His verse letter “From Saint Nicholas” is perfectly consistent with the old, judgmental Christmas and with his other writings.
Furthermore, Foster points out another detail that favors the Scots-Dutch Livingston. In the 1823 newspaper printing of the poem — the earliest version known to survive — the reindeer names make awkward reading, between strange punctuation and a Dutch near-rhyme:
Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen,
On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem; (Reprint from Melvilliana blog)
Dunder and Blixem are Dutch words for “Thunder and Lightning” in the original verse. Only one of the contending poets — Livingston — was Dutch.
Editors after 1823 changed Dunder to Donder and Blixem to Blixen. Moore himself changed the spelling to German “Blitzen” (Manuscript variants and printed “A Gift for Christmas” altered in Moore’s hand at the Museum of the City of New York). Between 1823 and Moore’s 1844 book Poems, Dutch reindeer names became a Dutch-German hybrid.
The strange, awkward cadence of the reindeer lines is also noteworthy. Don Foster found that Livingston was prone to insert exclamations in his poetry and prose. Wincing more at clunky lines, Mary Van Deusen wrote that her ancestor was sometimes “a pretty sloppy poet” (“Reindeer Names”). There is nothing sloppy about punctuating lines so that they sound like actual speech. The author of “Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now!” did not consider it demeaning to St. Nicholas to have him shout like a teamster driving horses, with the strongest vocalization on the first syllable. An editor after 1823 changed the punctuation, and Moore in 1844 kept the changed version. Moore’s Santa speaks in even verse. The 1823 character yelled like a hired man.
A Quiet Reading of the Mystery
Scholars come to different conclusions depending on where they begin. Those who think the burden of proof is on the Livingstons are not convinced by Don Foster’s stylistic evidence.6 However, reading the poems side by side leads many people to replace Moore with Livingston as the likely author.
The Quiet Reader asks what common sympathy has to say.
Of Livingston: Generations of family letters in Mary Van Deusen’s archive attest to the way the beloved father and grandfather and the Christmas poem bound a family together as its members spread out from the Hudson River Valley to Long Island in one direction and Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin in the other. Aunts, uncles, and grandmothers repeated what they remembered and what they had heard, keeping alive stories about a man whose memory they treasured.
“My father had a fine poetical taste,” wrote one of Henry’s youngest daughters, Elizabeth (1805-1886) to a niece fifty years her junior, Anne Livingston Goodrich, in 1879.
[H]e also had a great taste for drawing and painting. When we were children he used to entertain us on winter evenings by getting down the paint box, we seated around the table, first he would portray something very pathetic, which would melt us to tears, the next thing would be so comic, that we would be almost wild with laughter. And this dear good man was your Great-great-grandfather, Henry Livingston.
Family interest in the poem has kept relationships alive and memories fond for two centuries.
Moore: As the story goes, Clement Moore went out to buy a Christmas turkey and came home with a poem fully formed in his head. If this was true, what a lesson in the value of going out for fresh air on a winter morning!
With the exception of this interval of levity and joy, Moore was prone to moralizing, scolding, and venting his frustrations in sarcasm, including children and Christmas as subjects of his dismay. The first poem in his 1844 volume recounts a family trip to Saratoga, beginning sweetly in “the springtime of the year” and dissolving into “Babylonish noise about my ears” from the six “clamorous” and “boisterous” children, whose racket “nearly splits my head.” Moore’s poetry shows the influence of Calvinist religion on an American Episcopalian of the early 1800s: In every gift of God reposes sin. The task of the poet, parent, and professor is to shine a bright light on it so the sinner may repent.
If Moore wrote “The Night Before Christmas,” his readers and descendants can take comfort in the knowledge that even the most severe soul at some time or another may feel the hand of mercy. On the way to get the turkey, Moore had a revelation of merriment and joy. If afterward, he returned to his old style of speech and writing, no one can take that one ebullient Christmas from him.
The Poets Get the Last Word
In case you would like to read more from the poets, here are the first and last stanzas of one of Moore’s beautiful, loving poems, “Lines Written after a Snow-Storm,” by Clement C. Moore:
Come children dear, and look around; Behold how soft and light The silent snow had clad the ground In robes of purest white. . . . But see, my darlings, while we stay And gaze with fond delight, The fairy scene soon fades away, And mocks our raptur'd sight. And let this fleeting vision teach A truth you soon must know -- That all the joys we here can reach Are transient as the snow.
Here are the first and last stanzas of a Livingston poem inspired similarly by looking outdoors. “An Invitation to the Country” begins and ends,
The winter all surly is flown, The frost, and the ice, and the snow: The violets already have blown, Already the daffodils glow. . . . The Linnet, and Thrush, thro the day, Join notes with the soft cooing dove; Not a bush, but can witness a lay; Or the softer endearments of Love.
More of Henry Livingston’s poems and Clement C. Moore’s poems are transcribed and digitized at HenryLivingston.com.
To hear my rendition of the 1823 poem, with St. Nick shouting like a driver of horses, start the voiceover at the top of this post around the 1:30 mark.
Peace in your homes, and Happy Christmas and New Year to all!
At Sarah Fay’s Headline Hub (her Substack Chat), some suggestions for titling this post were gloriously inventive, and I gave serious consideration to more than one. In addition to
(“A Christmas Mystery / Who really wrote ‘The Night Before Christmas’?”) and , (“ ‘Twas the Night Before Copyright”) and (variations on Reindeer Games) and stimulated my creativity a great deal.Professor of Biblical Learning is the title ascribed to Moore in Don Foster’s Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (Henry Holt, 2000), pg. 244.
Foster, Author Unknown, pg. 237.
A bibliography of editions of “The Night Before Christmas” hints at what’s at stake for some readers: “Written 180 years ago by a noted theologian and biblical scholar, there are few who do not know Clement Clarke Moore’s tale of the mysterious Christmas eve visitor,” begins Nancy H. Marshall at nightbeforechristmas.biz. Moore was not a theologian. He did donate land for a theological seminary and offer to teach there, as he donated money for a church organ and installed himself to play it. This is not quite the same as being a “noted . . . scholar.” But for some who love the poem, there is particular satisfaction in thinking of the author as a distinguished divine.
Nissenbaum tells this history of Christmas and St. Nicholas in The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday (Vintage, 1997). In the book and his Substack interview last year, he treats Moore’s authorship of the Christmas poem as settled fact.
It doesn’t help that he made some mistakes. At one point he confuses Livingston’s daughter Eliza with his daughter-in-law Eliza. More gravely, he thinks a note in a book shows Moore taking credit for someone else’s work in another case, but Seth Kaller has shown from handwriting analysis that the note was not Moore’s. A bibliographer mistakenly attributed another book to Moore. If Foster could make that bad a mistake, wonder some readers, can he be trusted on any point?
If there were only two people living in the world and they lived on opposite sides of the globe, they would still plagiarize each other because that’s what humans do. They never seem to understand that if they put as much effort into writing original work, they would produce twice as much in the time it takes to find somewhat relevant material to steal, work it in so it kind of seems to fit, and spend hours in efforts to obfuscate and deny they copied everything.
Writing original material is the lazy writer’s method of choice.
A fascinating and entertaining piece, Tara! Based on the evidence you present, I have to side with Livingston. Moore’s account of how he came up with the poem may be even more fantastical than flying reindeer. (Thank you for the shout-out, by the way. I think the title you went with is perfect.)