Original Text of 'A Visit From St. Nicholas' in the Troy Sentinel, 1823

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Mac Jackson Says About It: This book celebrates the life and times of Poughkeepsie army major and land-holder Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748–1828), the true author of that classic of popular culture, "The Night Before Christmas." Mary Van Deusen's lively writing is enhanced by a wealth of evocative illustrations. Her research has been exceptionally thorough, and many primary documents are reproduced. Livingston's ancestors, relatives, and descendants belong in the story, so that biography is extended into fascinating family and social history. Included are many examples of Livingston's verse and prose. The quest to prove that he composed "The Night Before Christmas" is related in detail, and there is a clear description of the research that established the truth.

Livingston's engaging personality shines through this account, which vividly conjures up a bygone age.

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ABOUT MY BOOKS

Henry Livingston, Jr., The Poet You Always Loved Kindle Edition: 449 pages with 140 illustrations, 95 references
The Night Before Christmas: Soft Cover 32 pages with 32 illustrations from 14 vintage editions; one page text; glossy stock
The Night Before Christmas Kindle Edition: 114 pages, with 89 illustrations from 21 vintage editions; about twenty-five pages of the story of Henry, and the quest to prove his authorship- at children's reading level; Appendix of Illustrations by Author
Trice Happy Poetry Soft Cover: 48 pages with 174 postcard illustrations of 14 poems about beautiful women, approx. 4 per page; one page text; glossy stock
Thrice Happy Poetry Kindle Edition: 182 postcard illustrations of 14 poems about beautiful women, 1 per page; one page text

A limited number of autographed copies of soft cover books are available at a special price

MAC'S CONCLUSIONS

"It must be emphasized that the most significant tests conducted here are not of lexical items whose presence or absence depends on content. They are of the frequencies of common words such as
"the," "on," "as," "at," "to," "that," "would," and "some"; locutions such as "many a" and "in vain"; and phoneme pairs comprised of the last phonetic symbol in one word and the first in the next. These elements of composition are not readily subject to imitation. Their rates of use are largely beyond a writer's conscious control. They distinguish Moore's verse from Livingston's and they classify "The Night Before Christmas" with the latter. The reasonable conclusion is that "The Night Before Christmas" was composed by Henry Livingston."

Mac Jackson's Statistical Authorship Analysis
Arguments for Henry's authorship        Henry's Poetry        Moore's Poetry
First Publication        Smoking Gun?        Happy Christmas        Reindeer Names        Timeline
Henry by Slideshow        Henry by Book

Fun Activities for Christmas

Troy NY Jury Comes Down For Henry! Read Proclamation PDF
	TRIAL BEFORE CHRISTMAS: On December 7th, 2014, a mock trial was put together by Duncan Crary and Jack Casey in Troy NY, the city where 'Night Before Christmas' was first published in the Troy Sentinel. Jack and Molly Casey prosecuted Henry Livingston's case against Clement Moore for claiming authorship of a poem written by Henry, with me, Mary Van Deusen, plaintiff for 5th great grandfather, Henry. Moore was defended by E. Stewart Jones, Jr., with Chris Post defendant for his ancestor, Clement Clarke Moore. The presiding judge was Retired New York State Supreme Court Justice Edward O. Spain. 6 spectators were randomly chosen for the jury. The ghost of Henry Livingston was brilliantly played by Byron Nilsson. The verdict was unanimous! Henry Livingston, Jr. was the author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas."

This is the first publication of "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas". The poem came to the Troy Sentinel out of the Moore household. The question raised in the authorship conflict is not whether the poem came from Clement Moore's household or not but, rather, how it got to that household in the FIRST place.
Stories passed down the line of Henry Livingston's children tell of the children hearing the poem read to them by Henry almost twenty years before the poem's publication. Those children, in turn, read the poem to their children as the work of their grandfather.
As to a possible path between the Livingston and Moore households, Livingson family stories talk of a governess visiting with the Livingstons before stopping off at the Clement Moore household on her way down south to work. There are no specific names attached to this story, but it is interesting to look at Henry's next door neighbors, John Moore and his wife, Judith Newcomb Livingston Moore.
Judith was Henry's first cousin, while John's brother was married to Clement Moore's aunt. Keep in mind that Henry is of Clement Moore's FATHER'S generation, not Clement Moore's.
John and Judith's daughter, Lydia Hubbard Moore, married Episcopalian minister Rev. William Henry Hart, and lived in Virginia.
Lydia and William's daughter, Frances Livingston Hart, married Rev. Clement Moore Butler of Troy New York, the brother of the Harriet Butler who, according to Moore himself, took the poem to the Troy Sentinel.

We know not to whom we are indebted for the following description of that unwearied patron of children -- that homely, but delightful personification of parental kindness: -- Sante Claus, his costume and his equipage, as he goes about visiting the fire-sides of this happy land, laden with Christmas bounties; but, from whomsoever it may have come, we give thanks for it. There is, to our apprehension, a spirit of cordial goodness in it, a playfulness of fancy, and a benevolent alacrity to enter into the feelings and promote the simple pleasures of children, which are altogether charming. We hope our little patrons, both lads and lasses, will accept it as proof of our unfeigned good will toward them -- as a token of our warmest wish that they may have many a merry Christmas; that they may long retain their beautiful relish for those unbought, homebred joys, which derive their flavor from filial piety and fraternal love, and which they may be assured are the least alloyed that time can furnish them; and that they may never part with that simplicity of character, which is their own fairest ornament, and for the sake of which they have been pronounced, by authority which none can gainsay, the types of such as shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.

Troy Sentinel 1823

When analyzing the Christmas poem for authorship attribution, this is the version of the poem to which the poetry of Moore and the poetry of Livingston are compared.
Various scholars over the years have produced qualitative arguments which have brought them down on the side of Livingston.
"...it is still my conviction that Livingston wrote the Night Before Christmas...and there are so many items, flairs and twinkles in the poem which one does not find in Moore and which so greatly characterize Livingston...I shall always be inclined to believe your ancestor wrote the poem...
      James G. Thurber, The New Yorker

*************
"There runs through all Professor Moore's verse a kind of frustration. He feels he should be a greater man than he is, a greater poet...He was a self-torturing Midas; all around him was a rich harvest of poetry, which he turned to lead."
      Henry N. MacCracken, President of Vassar College

*************
"Henry Livingston and the "Christmas" poet not only adopted the same words and phrasing; their respective poems were indebted, directly or indirectly, to the identical poets (including, I think, Allan Ramsay, Michael Drayton, Christopher Anstey, William King, John O'Keeffe, and Matthew Lewis, none of them poets who influenced Clement Moore)..."
      Don Foster, Vassar College

Mac Jackson's analysis, however, relies on quantatative methods.
"Moore and Livingston are significantly different in their rates of usage, and clearly Livingston uses fewer adjective-plus-noun combinations than Moore. In �The Night Before Christmas� they occur at a rate even lower than one might expect from Livingston. But of the two candidates, Livingston�s authorship of the poem is, in terms of these data, more than fifty times more probable than Moore�s."

01	'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house,
02	Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
03	The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
04	In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
05	The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
06	While visions of sugar plums danc'd in their heads,
07	And Mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
08	Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap-
09	When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
10	I sprung from the bed to see what was the matter.
11	Away to the window I flew like a flash,
12	Tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.
13	The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,
14	Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below;
15	When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
16	But a minature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer,
17	With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
18	I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
19	More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
20	And he whistled, and shouted, and call'd them by name:
21	"Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen,
22	"On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem;
23	"To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
24	"Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"
25	As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,
26	When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
27	So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
28	With the sleigh full of Toys - and St. Nicholas too:
29	And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
30	The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
31	As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
32	Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound:
33	He was dress'd all in fur, from his head to his foot,
34	And his clothes were all tarnish'd with ashes and soot;
35	A bundle of toys was flung on his back,
36	And he look'd like a peddler just opening his pack:
37	His eyes - how they twinkled! his dimples how merry,
38	His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
39	His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
40	And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
41	The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
42	And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
43	He had a broad face, and a little round belly
44	That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
45	He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
46	And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;
47	A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
48	Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
49	He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
50	And fill'd all the stockings; then turn'd with a jirk,
51	And laying his finger aside of his nose
52	And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.
53	He sprung to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
54	And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle:
55	But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight-
56	Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

There are some interesting "quirks" in this first publication - awkwardnesses that one would not expect to find in the always correct, but always dull, work of Moore.
'Sprung' in place of 'sprang.' 'Jirk' instead of the more common 'jerk.'
Rather than the normal anapestic rhythm,
     'dah dah DUM dah dah DUM dah dah DUM,'
the unbalanced rhythm of
     'As dry LEAVES be-fore the wild HUR-i-cane FLY.'

The weak rhyme of Vixen-Blixem. The awkward rhythm of
     "Now!    Dasher, now!    Dancer, now!    Prancer, and Vixen,
     "On!    Comet, on!    Cupid, on!    Dunder and Blixem;
Unlike Moore, Livingston's poems exhibit the spontaneous composition that occasionally sacrifices correctness for vitality.
The Crane be sure with her long beak
Could not a single morsel pick:
Ten MIN-utes past EIGHT & a VER-y cold NIGHT.
A vine from noblest lineage sprung
The ribband, the gause, & the ostrich's feather;

The presence of so many "quirks" gave subsequent editors countless opportunities to "fix" the poem. The most important of these fixes was the extensively edited broadsheet version from about 1830, published by the very same Norman Tuttle who had first published the poem. Only with this version, Tuttle really let his blue editing pencil loose.
Counting each line of the reindeer names as only 1 difference, there are FIFTY-FIVE editing differences between the poem as originally published by Tuttle in 1823, and the poem extensively edited by Tuttle around 1830.

And just why is this variant of the poem so important? Because it was an enclosure in a letter Tuttle wrote to Moore, responding to Moore's question whether Tuttle had known in 1823 who the author of the poem really was. Soon after receiving Tuttle's letter, Moore included the now famous 'Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas' in his book, 'Poems.'
Seventy years later, Dr. William S. Thomas inspired a Christian Science Monitor article of August 4, 1920, bringing out the Livingston family claims again, Clement's grandson, Casimir Moore, had his second cousin, Maria Jephson Post O'Conor, write out two depositions to counter the Livingston claims. Maria, then sixty-five, explained that her father had gotten the story of the Christmas poem directly from Moore himself. She explained,
"Mr Moore also told my father when he came to publish the same, with some of his other poems, he only made two slight changes in the lines as originally written by him."

Interesting. Also untrue.
You see the version of the poem which Moore used as the base of his 1844 poem was NOT "the lines originally written by him," but the 1830 version of the poem which Tuttle had so extensively edited.

Wonder what would have happened if Tuttle had enclosed an original 1823 copy of the poem in his letter, rather than the 1830 edited one.
You'd think a poet would keep a copy of his own writing. Or at least wouldn't slavishly copy someone else's edits.