A Visit from St. Nicholas
A Visit from St. Nicholas, more commonly known as The Night Before Christmas and Twas the Night Before Christmas from its first line, is a poem first published anonymously under the title Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas in 1823 and later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed authorship in 1837. The poem has been called "arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American" and is largely responsible for some of the conceptions of Santa Claus from the mid-nineteenth century to today. It has had a massive effect on the  history of Christmas gift-giving. Before the poem gained wide popularity, American ideas had varied considerably about Saint Nicholas and other Christmastide visitors. "A Visit from St. Nicholas" eventually was set to music and has been recorded by many artists. Plot. On the night of Christmas Eve, a family is settling down to sleep when the father is disturbed by noises on the lawn outside. Looking out the window, he sees Saint Nicholas in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. After landing his sleigh on the roof, Saint Nicholas enters the house down the chimney, carrying a sack of toys . The father watches his visitor fill the stockings hanging by the fireplace, and laughs to himself. They share a conspiratorial moment before Saint Nicholas bounds up the chimney again. As he flies away, he wishes a "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night." Literary history. The authorship of "A Visit" is credited to Clement Clarke Moore who is said to have composed it on a snowy winter's day during a shopping trip on a sleigh. His inspiration for the character of Saint Nicholas was a local Dutch handyman as well as the historic Saint Nicholas. Moore  originated many of the features that are still associated with Santa Claus today while borrowing other aspects, such as the use of reindeer. The poem was first published anonymously in the Troy, New York "Sentinel" on 23 December 1823, having been sent there by a friend of Moore, and was reprinted frequently thereafter with no name attached. It was first attributed in print to Moore in 1837. Moore himself acknowledged authorship when he included it in his own book of poems in 1844. By then, the original publisher and at least seven others had already acknowledged his authorship. Moore had  a reputation as an erudite professor and had not wished at first to be connected with the unscholarly verse. He included it in the anthology at the insistence of his children, for whom he had originally written the piece. Moore's conception of Saint Nicholas was borrowed from his friend Washington Irving, but Moore portrayed his "jolly old elf" as arriving on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. At the time that Moore wrote the poem, Christmas Day was overtaking New Year's Day as the preferred genteel family holiday of the season, but some Protestants viewed Christmas as the  result of "Catholic ignorance and deception" and still had reservations. By having Saint Nicholas arrive the night before, Moore "deftly shifted the focus away from Christmas Day with its still-problematic religious associations". As a result, "New Yorkers embraced Moore's child-centered version of Christmas as if they had been doing it all their lives." In "An American Anthology, 1787–1900", editor Edmund Clarence Stedman reprinted the Moore version of the poem, including the Dutch spelling of “Donder” and German spelling of "Blitzen" that he adopted, rather than the version from 1823 "Dunder and Blixem" that is more similar to  the old Dutch “Donder en Blixem” that translates to "Thunder and Lightning". Modern printings frequently incorporate alterations that reflect changing linguistic and cultural sensibilities. For example, "breast" in "The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow" is frequently bowdlerized to "crest"; the archaic "ere" in "But I heard him exclaim ere he drove out of sight" is frequently replaced with "as". This change implies that Santa Claus made his exclamation during the moment that he disappeared from view, while the exclamation came before his disappearance in the original. "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night  is frequently rendered with the traditional English locution Merry Christmas". Authorship controversy. Moore's connection with the poem has been questioned by Professor Donald Foster, who used textual content analysis and external evidence to argue that Moore could not have been the author. Foster believes that Major Henry Livingston Jr., a New Yorker with Dutch and Scottish roots, should be considered the chief candidate for authorship, a view long espoused by the Livingston family. Livingston was distantly related to Moore's wife. Foster's claim, however, has been countered by document dealer and historian Seth Kaller, who once owned one  of Moore's original manuscripts of the poem. Kaller has offered a point-by-point rebuttal of both Foster's linguistic analysis and external findings, buttressed by the work of autograph expert James Lowe and Dr. Joe Nickell, author of "Pen, Ink and Evidence." Evidence in favor of Moore. On January 20, 1829, Troy editor Orville L. Holley alluded to the author of the Christmas poem, using terms that accurately described Moore as a native and current resident of New York City, and as "a gentleman of "more" merit as a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy  pretensions". In December 1833, a diary entry by Francis P. Lee, a student at General Theological Seminary when Moore taught there, referred to a holiday figure of St. Nicholas as being "robed in fur, and dressed according to the description of Prof. Moore in his poem". Four poems including "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appeared under Moore's name in The New-York Book of Poetry, edited by Charles Fenno Hoffman (New York: George Dearborn, 1837). The Christmas poem appears on pp. 217–19, credited to "Clement C. Moore". Moore stated in a letter to the editor of the New York  American (published on March 1, 1844) that he "gave the publisher" of "The New-York Book of Poetry" "several pieces, among which was the 'Visit from St. Nicholas.'" Admitting that he wrote it "not for publication, but to amuse my children," Moore claimed the Christmas poem in this 1844 letter as his "literary property, however small the intrinsic value of that property may be". "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appears on pp. 124–27 in Moore's volume of collected Poems (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1844). Before 1844, the poem was included in two 1840 anthologies: attributed to "Clement C.  Moore" in Selections from The American Poets, edited by William Cullen Bryant (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840), pp. 285–86; and to "C. C. Moore" in the first volume of The Poets of America, edited by John Keese (New York: S. Colman, 1840), pp. 102–04. The New-York Historical Society has a later manuscript of the poem in Moore's handwriting, forwarded by T. W. C. Moore along with a cover letter dated March 15, 1862 giving circumstances of the poem's original composition and transmission after a personal "interview" with Clement C. Moore. After "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appeared  under Moore's name in the 1837 "New-York Book of Poetry", newspaper printings of the poem often credited Moore as the author. For example, the poem is credited to "Professor Moore" in the 25 December 1837 "Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier". Although Moore did not authorize the earliest publication of the poem in the Troy "Sentinel", he had close ties to Troy through the Protestant Episcopal Church that could explain how it got there. Harriet Butler of Troy, New York (daughter of the Rev. David Butler) who allegedly showed the poem to "Sentinel" editor Orville L. Holley, was a  family friend of Moore's and possibly a distant relative. A letter to Moore from the publisher Norman Tuttle states, "I understand from Mr. Holley that he received it from Mrs. Sackett, the wife of Mr. Daniel Sackett who was then a merchant in this city". The reported involvement of two women, Harriet Butler and Sarah Sackett, as intermediaries is consistent with the 1862 account of the poem's earliest transmission in which T. W. C. Moore describes two stages of copying, first "by a relative of Dr Moores in her Album" and second, "by a friend of hers, from  Troy". Moore preferred to be known for his more scholarly works, but allowed the poem to be included in his anthology in 1844 at the request of his children. By that time, the original publisher and at least seven others had already acknowledged his authorship. Livingston family lore gives credit to their forebear rather than Moore, but there is no proof that Livingston himself ever claimed authorship, nor has any record ever been found of any printing of the poem with Livingston's name attached to it, despite more than 40 years of searches. Evidence in favor of Livingston. Advocates  for Livingston's authorship argue that Moore "tried at first to disavow" the poem. They also posit that Moore falsely claimed to have translated a book. Document dealer and historian Seth Kaller has challenged both claims. Kaller examined the book in question, "A Complete Treatise on Merinos and Other Sheep", as well as many letters signed by Moore, and found that the "signature" was not penned by Moore, and thus provides no evidence that Moore made any plagiaristic claim. Kaller's findings were confirmed by autograph expert James Lowe, by Dr. Joe Nickell, the author of "Pen, Ink & Evidence," and  by others. According to Kaller, Moore's name was likely written on the book by a New-York Historical Society cataloger to indicate that it had been a gift from Moore to the Society. The following points have been advanced in order to credit the poem to Major Henry Livingston Jr.: Livingston also wrote poetry primarily using an anapaestic metrical scheme, and it is claimed that some of the phraseology of "A Visit" is consistent with other poems by Livingston, and that Livingston's poetry is more optimistic than Moore's poetry published in his own name. But Stephen Nissenbaum  argues in his "Battle for Christmas" that the poem could have been a social satire of the Victorianization of Christmas. Furthermore, Kaller claims that Foster cherry-picked only the poems that fit his thesis and that many of Moore's unpublished works have a tenor, phraseology, and meter similar to "A Visit". Moore had even written a letter titled "From Saint Nicholas" that may have predated 1823. Foster also contends that Moore hated tobacco and would, therefore, never have depicted Saint Nicholas with a pipe. However, Kaller notes, the source of evidence for Moore's supposed disapproval of tobacco is  The Wine Drinker, another poem by him. In actuality, that verse contradicts such a claim. Moore's "The Wine Drinker" criticizes self-righteous, hypocritical advocates of temperance who secretly indulge in the substances which they publicly oppose, and supports the social use of tobacco in moderation (as well as wine, and even opium, which was more acceptable in his day than it is now). MacDonald P. Jackson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, has spent his entire academic career analyzing authorship attribution. He has written  a book titled "Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"?: Analyzing the Clement Clarke Moore Vs. Henry Livingston Question", published in 2016, in which he evaluates the opposing arguments and, for the first time, uses the author-attribution techniques of modern computational stylistics to examine the long-standing controversy. Jackson employs a range of tests and introduces a new one, statistical analysis of phonemes; he concludes that Livingston is the true author of the classic work. Musical adaptations. Parts of the poem have been set to music numerous times, including a bowdlerized version (that omitted several verses such as ""The moon  on the breast of the new fallen snow ... etc."". and rewrote and replaced many others such as ""the prancing and pawing of each little hoof"" with ""the clattering noise of each galloping hoof""), by the American composer Ken Darby (1909-1992), whose version was recorded by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians three separate times; in 1942, 1955, and 1963. The latter 1963 stereo recording for Capitol Records became the most familiar of the poem's musical adaptations. Christmas song-writing specialist Johnny Marks also composed a short version in 1952, titled "The Night Before Christmas Song", which has been recorded  multiple times, and was used in the soundtrack for the 1964 TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, sung by Burl Ives. The poem was also set to music by British child composer Alma Deutscher (b. 2005).In 1953, Perry Como recorded a recitation of the poem for RCA Victor with background music arranged and conducted by Mitchell Ayres. Louis Armstrong recited the poem in a March 1971 recording made only four months before his death. It was recorded at his home in Corona, Queens and released as 45rpm by Continental Records. The first completely musical rendition, that used the text  of the poem in its entirety without material additions or alterations, was the cantata "A Visit from St. Nicholas" composed by Lucian W. Dressel in 1992 and first performed by the Webster University Orchestra, SATB Soloists, and Chorus. More recent performances of the cantata have been performed by regional orchestras and choruses in Missouri, Illinois and Colorado. Original copies. Four hand-written copies of the poem are known to exist and three are in museums, including the New-York Historical Society library. The fourth copy, written out and signed by Clement Clarke Moore as a gift to a friend in  1860, was sold by one private collector to another in December 2006. It was purchased for $280,000 by an unnamed "chief executive officer of a media company" who resides in New York City, according to Dallas, Texas-based Heritage Auctions which brokered the private sale. References. Notes Further reading