December 24, 2018 • 38 mins
We're taking a look at three creative works that have become staples of the Christmas season. All three of them have played a huge part in how people observe and celebrate Christmas in parts of the world, and they all have milestone birthdays this year.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Honley Frying. Today's podcast
is coming out on Christmas Eve, so it seems like
a good time to take a look at three creative
(00:24):
works that have become staples of the Christmas season. All
three of them have played a huge part and how
people observe and celebrate Christmas and parts of the world,
and they all happen to have milestone birthdays this year.
So A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens turned a hundred
and seventy five on December nineteen. The poem A Visit
(00:46):
from St. Nicholas turned a hundred nine on December Probably
we're going to talk a little bit about that too,
And then the song Still Knocked or Silent Night is
turning two hundred on the day that this episode comes out.
I will tell you that if you had asked me
before any of this research landing in my hand, I
(01:06):
would have reversed the order that I believed they were
in terms of age. You would have put the you
would have put Silent Night as the youngest one. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know why, but in my brain it seems newer.
I don't know why. Um I think I bet it
has to do with perception that I always see a
Christmas Carol or I have often seen a Christmas Carol
played out in old timey costumes, and that has been
(01:30):
the case with the other two. So in my head
those must be those must be the younger ones. I
think that's what it is. But we're going to start
with the youngest of these three works, and that is
Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in Prose being a Ghost
Story of Christmas, first published by Chapman and Hall on
December ninety three, and this novella begins with the author's
(01:52):
note quote, I have endeavored in this ghostly little book
to raise the ghost of an idea which shall not
put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other,
with the season, or with me. May it haunt their
houses pleasantly, And no one wished to lay it their
faithful friend and servant C. D. Today's readers may miss
(02:13):
the double meaning of to lay it, which meant both
to lay the book down and to lay the ghost
Dickens was raising to rest. Then the book moves on
to the relatively un Christmas e opening line of Marley
was dead to begin with, there is no doubt whatsoever
about that. Then it introduces Ebenezer Scrooge quote a tight
(02:33):
fisted hand at the grindstone, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,
covetous old center. There's also his jolly and kind hearted
nephew Fred, his ill treated employee, Bob Cratchett, cratch its son,
Tiny Tim, and the ghosts of Marley and the spirits
of Christmas past, present and yet to come. The story,
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of course, follows Scrooge as he becomes a kinder and
more generous person through the intervention of all these spirits.
God bless us everyone. A Christmas Carol is commonly named
as one of the best selling books of all time,
but because of its age, that's actually pretty tricky to confirm,
and at this point there are also hundreds and hundreds
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of adaptations across many genres and many types of media.
You can see flickers of it in everything from It's
a Wonderful Life to How the grinchtul Christmas and none
of this colossal popularity is New. When it was first
published in eighteen forty three, its first run of six
thousand copies sold out in just a week, and within
two months of its debut, eight different dramatic versions were
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already being staged. But Charles Dickens didn't originally set out
to write a book when he wrote a Christmas Carol,
his original intent was a pamphlet. Earlier, in eighteen forty three,
he had read a report on child labor in Britain,
and he had also visited what he described as a
ragged school. Urbanization, industrialization and the eighteen thirty four Poor
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Laws had all combined to create a system of really
devastating poverty in nineteenth century England. Conditions at a lot
of the factories were just appalling, and children employed in
the factories frequently did exhausting and dangerous work. This whole
system was also set up so that the poor were
forced to go work in workhouses, but the conditions at
(04:25):
those workhouses were so terrible into humanizing, that people would
do anything rather than to go there. Dickens thoughts on
all of this were certainly influenced by his own lived experience.
When he was a child, his father was placed in
a debtor's prison over an unpaid bakery bill. Dickens had
to leave school and work in a bootblacking factory. So
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Dickens wanted to do something about all of this, and
he initially planned a pamphlet called an Appeal to the
People of England on Behalf of the poor Man's Child,
but he quickly decided that work of fiction might do
a better job of getting his point across than a pamphlet. Wood.
He also had a practical motivation to write a book
instead of a pamphlet. He flat out needed money. He
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had just come back from a tour of the US
where he had been treated like a celebrity, but he
hadn't earned very much, so he needed to write a
work that would sell, and that meant a book, not
a pamphlet. He cranked out a Christmas Carol over just
a couple of months of writing, while also working on
the Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit as a serial.
He's described as basically the most famous writer living at
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that moment. And so he went on this whole tour
of the US and Canada and was just hailed everywhere
that he went, but did not earn money. Off of it.
A Christmas Carol really synthesizes a lot that was going
on at the time that it was written. There's the
Victorian fascination with ghosts and the supernatural, the horrors of
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poverty and morality. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge really embodies
commonly held attitudes towards the poor, seeing them as a
burden on society who just deserved the cruelties and degradations
of the workhouse. The celebration of Christmas in Britain was
also shifting during this time. Christmas trees, turkey dinners, decorating
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with evergreens, gifts, and greeting cards were all becoming more
and more popular. So A Christmas Carol both reflected and
reinforced the Victorian idea of how to celebrate Christmas. It's
also credited with popularizing Merry Christmas as a Christmas greeting
and with the idea that there should be snow at Christmas.
Even though A Christmas Carol was an instant bestseller, Dickens
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did not make nearly as much money with it as
he hoped, and this was mostly because of his own decisions.
He wanted this book to be really nice with fancy
gilded bindings and woodcuts and edgings and extravagant lettering. All
that stuff cost money. He even made last it changes
to the title and in pages of the books because
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he wasn't satisfied with the original versions. All of this
was very expensive and cut very deeply into his profits.
That entire first printing only netted two thirty pounds, and
that was a fraction of the thousand pounds that he
had hoped to make off of this book. In its
first year, A Christmas Carol sold fifteen thousand copies, and
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even after that he still was not anywhere close to
that thousand pound mark. It's like he needed a business
manager to explain, like how the ballance of of profit
works um And while the book was not a financial
success at all, it was incredibly well received. It was
nicknamed a new gospel. William make Peace. Thackeray described it
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as quote a national benefit and to every man and
woman who reads it a personal kindness. It also appears
to have inspired exactly the kind of charitable mindset that
Dickens had hoped that it would when he just decided
to write it. The following spring, Gentleman's Magazine reported quote,
more extensive kindness has been dispensed to those who are
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in want at the present season than at any preceding one.
Later on, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend that
after reading this book he wanted to quote go out
and comfort someone. And he insisted in the same letter
that the idea of not handing out money to people
who needed it was just nonsense. On top of all that,
a Christmas Carol launched the genre of Christmas books, It
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also popularized the genre of Christmas ghost stories, although the
British tradition of telling ghost stories around a fire in
winter definitely predates Dickens's work. Dickenspace this disparity between how
his book was received and how much money he made
off of it with a lot of frustration. He summed
up his chagrin in a letter saying, quote, what a
wonderful thing it is that such a great success should
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occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment. It took him
more than ten years after this book came out to
really get on stable financial footing. At the same time,
though he was genuinely glad that it inspired such a
wave of seasonal goodwill and really spread the idea that
employers had a duty not to be completely horrible to
their employees. I don't know why that tickles me, but
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it does. Uh. Today, Dickens's original handwritten manuscript of a
Christmas Carol is at the Morgan Library and Museum in
New York City, and they put it on display there
every Christmas season. I don't think I have been at
the Morgan at exactly the time when they're showing it.
But when I realized that, I was like, do I
need to go to New York between now at the
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end of the year. I don't think I do. We
will get into our next little piece of culture after
a quick sponsor break. People may know our next subject,
which is the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas by
another name The Night Before Christmas. A Visit from St.
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Nicholas is sometimes also called an Account of a Visit
from St. Nicholas, and it was first published in The
Troy Sentinel of Troy, New York on December eighteen, twenty three.
This is the one that starts twas the Night before
Christmas went all through the house, not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse. The narrator and his wife and
the story are settling in Forbid when St. Nicholas arrives
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in a miniature sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer. In
the first printing, they were named Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, comment, Cupid, Dunder,
and Blixum not blitzen. Uh. St Nicholas, not Honor is
described as chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.
He comes down the chimney with a bound. He fills
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all the stockings with presents, and then he goes back
up the chimney before flying away, exclaiming Happy Christmas to
all and to all a good night. Similarly to how
a Christmas carol really reinforced and spread the way that
the Victorians were celebrating Christmas, this poem how a huge
effect on how people think about Christmas, especially St. Nick.
Among other things, a visit from St. Nicholas really cemented
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jolly old St. Nick as this rotund and laughing person
with twinkling eyes and a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer
who comes into people's homes by sliding down the chimney.
That's not the first ever appearance of sliding down the chimney,
but it did really popularize all of that. And then
they're also the sugar plums, which went on to become
a prominent part of the Nutcracker suite in eight after
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that first appearance of the poem, in eighty three, the
Troy Sentinel reprinted a Visit from St. Nicholas every year,
still anonymously. Over the years, it went through various edits,
mostly related to changes in spelling. For example, in earlier
editions of the poem, the narrator sprung from the bed,
but later he sprang, and of course dunder and Blixum
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became dunder Mifflin. No, I'm kidding became Donner and blitzen Uh.
The poem was picked up in other public as well.
As this poem grew in popularity, people started writing into
the Troy Sentinel to talk about or to ask about,
who the author was. In eighteen nine, the paper printed
that they could only say that it was someone quote
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by birth and residence to the city of New York,
and that he is a gentleman of more merit as
a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions.
Then in eighteen thirty seven, Charles Fenno. Hoffman published a
book called New York Book of Poetry, in which he
named the author of a Visit from St. Nicholas as
his friend, Clement Clark More. More was a scholar and
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a professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York City,
where he taught subjects such as Hebrew and Greek literature.
His other works included a two volume compendious lexicon of
the Hebrew language. At first, More didn't really acknowledge Hoffman's
claim that he had written a Visit from St. Nicholas,
but in eighteen forty four he included the work in
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an antiology of his poetry. He said that he had
written it for his children back in eighteen twenty two,
and that he had never intended for it to be
made public outside their family at all. The most common
explanation for how it came to be in the pages
of the Troy Sentinel was that a family friend named
Sarah Harriet Butler had visited that Christmas of eighteen twenty
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two and taken a copy of this family poem home
with her, and then sent it to the Sentinel the
following year without telling more about it. In eighteen sixty two,
the librarian of the New York Historical Society asked More
to handwrite a copy of it for their collections, and
he did. You can see a scan of it online
at the New York Historical Society Museum and Library website.
(13:45):
At the time, the Society's librarian noted that when they
were discussing this request for a manuscript, Moore said his
inspiration for his depiction of St. Nick was quote, a
portly rubicund Dutchman living in the neighborhood. He wrote out
other copies the poem on request as well. However, there's
also a competing claim to the authorship of a visit
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from St. Nicholas. Descendants of Major Henry Livingston Jr. Had
said that he, not More, was the one who wrote
the poem all the way back in roughly eighteen o eight,
a few years after the eighteen forty four anthology of
Moore's poetry came out, the Livingstone's learned about it, and
various members of the family started writing to each other
about how Moore was taking credit for their father or
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grandfather's poem, depending on who was doing the writing, But
they didn't really go public with their allegations until the
early nineteen hundreds. By that point, all they really had
to go on with this claim was their family lore.
The family members who had said they had personal memories
of it had all died, and then Livingston himself had
been dead for sixteen years when Moore's anthology came out,
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So even when that anthology came out, they could not
just go ask him, hey, is this the poem that
you wrote? There is no original handwritten copy of a
visit from St. Nicholas from eighteen o eight or eighteen
twenty two. The Livingston family said they had a manuscript
with handwritten notes, but that it was destroyed in a
fire around eighteen fifty nine. So this has spawned a
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debate over who should actually get credit. Moore's supporters have
pointed out that the Troy Sentinel described the poet as
a scholar from New York City. More was a scholar
and was born in New York City, and when this
poem was first published, he was living in an estate
in Chelsea, Manhattan. Livingstone, on the other hand, was neither
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a scholar nor from New York City. He was sort
of a gentleman farmer living in Poughkeepsie, roughly eighty miles
or a hundred and twenty nine kilometers north of New
York City. More supporters also questioned why More would take
credit for the poem if he didn't write it, going
so far as to write out copies for historical collections,
especially since he seemed kind of embarrassed that it had
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even been published in the first place. More, as a detractor,
on the other hand, have contended that he was too
preachy and cranky to have written such a lighthearted poem,
and also that he hated children. They've also noted that
Moore's family members gave three completely different stories about what
inspired him to write it. One was that it was
written to cheer up a sun after he was thrown
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from a horse and broke his leg. Another was that
he wrote it after having to go out on Christmas
Eve to find a turkey after the butcher didn't deliver their's,
And the last was that it was written after hearing
the bells jingling on his horse while traveling to his
Chelsea estate by slay. So they point to the existence
of these three disparate stories as a sign that none
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of them are true. Some of those spelling changes made
to the poem over the years have also been brought
up as evidence that Moore did not write it, especially
dunder and blix Um to donner and Blitzen. Dunder and
Blixum is supposedly derived from the Dutch words for thunder
and lightning, and Livingstone spoke Dutch. However, Moore spoke German,
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and donner und blitz is German for thunder and lightning. Ye,
dunder and donna are really the words for thunder. Neither
blicks him nor blitz in is exactly the word for lightning.
It's close in those two languages. Moore's detractors have also
brought up a handwritten note on the title page of
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a book that he donated to the New York Historical Society.
The note says, by Clement Seemore a m. This book
is a translation of another work in Moore's detractors say
that this is evidence that he made a habit of
just taking credit for other people's work, but his supporters
counter that this note is not even in his handwriting,
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and that it's probably not him trying to say I
translated this book, but it's just a notation written by
someone else. At the Historical Society to Mark, who donated
the book today. Livingstone supporters include Donald Foster of Vassar College,
who wrote author unn Own on the Trail of Anonymous
and McDonald P. Jackson of the University of Auckland, author
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of who wrote The Night Before Christmas. Analyzing the Clement
Clark Moore versus Henry Livingston question. Both Foster and Jackson
ground their arguments in linguistic forensics, with Jackson's book having
such chapter titles as the Evidence of Meter, Statistical Interlude,
phoneme pairs, definite and indefinite articles, and favorite expressions, and
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Quirks of style. Both of these men argue that the
poem uses language in a way that makes it more
likely to be Livingstone's than More's and Jackson's analysis the
most important part is quote the frequencies of common words
such as the on as at to that would and
some vocutions such as mania and in vain and phonyme
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pairs comprised of the last phonetic symbol on in one
word in the first in the next. Jackson goes on
to state that these elements of land, which are not
easy to imitate and are outside the conscious control of
a writer after Foster's book Author Unknown was published, Historic
document dealer Seth Keller published a point by point rebubbal
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of the various claims against Clement Moore as author of
a Visit from St. Nicholas, including Foster's forensic analysis. When
it comes to the more subjective claims of things like
More's temperament, Keller's response is sort of no, he wasn't
a jerky pedant who hated kids. Here are examples. But
when it came to the linguistic analysis, Caller contended that
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Foster cherry picked the evidence that supported the idea that
Livingstone was the author, while discarding everything that did not
support his idea. Caller concludes unequivocally that Moore wrote the poem.
McDonald p. Jackson's book just came out in April of
twenties sixteen, so it is really new, and there really
has not been a lot of scrutiny into whether his
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analysis holds up. I found one blog post on that
subject and nothing in any peer reviewed journal or anything
like that. The book Author Unknown as much older, so
there's been a lot more writing about whether those conclusions
are valid. However, it's important to note that there is
debate about whether linguistic forensics can reliably and conclusively identify
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the author of a work at all, especially as the
field stands right now. The field itself is kind of
divided over this issue of can linguistic forensics conclusively identify
the author of an unknown work, and several of Foster's
other attempts to use forensic linguistics and criminal investigations have
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been completely wrong. This includes falsely implicating the wrong man
in the September eleven anthrax attacks in the United States,
which led to a massive defamation suit. Keller, Jackson, and
Foster are just the latest round of people to weigh
in on this topic. It's been the subject of ongoing
debate since about and at this point. You will find
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the poem attributed in a lot of different ways. Encyclopedia
Britannica's entry on the poem attributes it to neither man,
but acknowledges the issue of its authorship in a paragraph.
The Academy of American Poets lists More as the author,
as do various publications from the U S Library of Congress.
The Poetry Foundation confusingly has the poem on two different
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pages on its website. One attributed to More and the
other attributed to Livingston. Livingstone's biography at the Poetry Foundation
lists him unequivocally as the author, while Moore's points out
the lack of concrete evidence in Livingstone's claim before saying,
scholars today give the credit to Livingstone. I don't know
what scholars are talking about. I am not a linguist.
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I am not a forensic scientist. But as a poet,
I find the idea that you can conclusively determine who
with the author was of a five hundred thing word
poem with some computer analysis, I find that specious. I
was having a conversation with somebody about this yesterday, and
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I think that forensic linguistics has the potential to someday
be sort of like fingerprinting in terms of identifying people,
but at this point it's a lot more like phrenology.
So that's my uh. I read a lot of very
frustrating charts of words in their use in different works
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by Clemettmore and and Livingston, and I found it all
very frustrating. And as a side note, this is not
the only he said. She said back and forth about
the authorship of a Christmas classic. Medford Massachusetts and Savannah, Georgia,
to cities I cannot think of more different from one another,
have both claimed to be the place where James Purepont
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wrote jingle Bells. They even have their own plaque about it,
each city having a plaque saying this is where where
he wrote jingle Bells. Over the last couple of years,
there's been a whole other argument raised about that author
or that location of where it was written, which is
that it might not be either of them. They might
both be wrong. Uh. Both cities, however, feel extremely passionately
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about it, and we are going to move on to
something that that has a much clearer authorship after another
quick break. The song Studa Knocked, known in English as
Silent Night or a Silent Night Holy Night, was created
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in the eighteen teens, and since neither Holly nor I
speak German, we do not want to traumatize people with
uh like preschool or ish attempt to read lyrics in German. Instead,
here is the beginning of the song from a nineteen
fourteen recording sung by Julia Culp Woo woo w. The
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most common English translation of this song is by Episcopal
priest John Freeman Young, who was born in Pittston, Maine,
and later became Bishop of Florida. His eighteen fifty nine
version starts silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all
is bright round yon, Virgin Mother and Child, Holy Infant,
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So tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in
heavenly Peace. The original German lyrics to Still An Act
were written by Joseph Moore. More had been born into
poverty in Salzburg on December eleventh, sevo and when he
was still a child, a local priest started mentoring him
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and saw that he had a talent for music. This
priest helped him get an education, including studying music at
a Benedictine monastery. More also attended the Lyceum school in Salzburg.
In eighteen eleven, More entered eeminary, something that he had
to get a special dispensation to do because his parents
had not been married. He was ordained in eighteen fifteen,
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and in eighteen sixteen he moved to the town of
mary up Far in Lungao in the Austrian Alps for
his first assignment as an assistant priest. And this area
was also where his father's family was from, and it
was where he wrote the poem that would become the
lyrics to Silent Night in eighteen sixteen. He never described
a specific inspiration for the poem, but Maria Far, which
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translates to Mary's Parish, had been the spiritual and religious
heart of the Lungo region for centuries, and it had
also really really struggled in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.
It had been occupied by Bavarian troops, and those troops
were finally withdrawing at about the same time that more
started working there. So it makes a lot of sense
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that all of this would come together to inspire a
poem about the Birth of Christ that prominently featured the
themes of peace, love and salvation. Working as an assistant
priest required more to move from place to place than
By eighteen eighteen, he had arrived in Oberndorf by Salzburg,
roughly eighty miles that's about a hundred and thirty kilometers
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northwest of Maria Far on the Austrian border, and like
Maria Far, this region had been through its share of turmoil.
Starting in the thirteenth century. It had been part of
a state that was ruled by the prince archbishops of
the city of Salzburg, but in eighteen oh three it
had been forced to secularize. Then, after the Napoleonic Wars,
the Congress of Vienna drew a new border through the region,
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and what had been its own entity was divided up
and absorbed into Austria and Bavaria. Part of this new
border followed the Salzac River, which ran directly through town,
and so what had been one municipality became Obendorf by Salzburg,
Austria on the east side of the river, and Laufen,
Bavaria on the west. The war had also affected the
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salt trade, which was a major part of the local economy,
so laborers and boat builders, who made up most of
the population of Obendorff, were really struggling. After the new
border was drawn, a parish was established at Obendorf by Salzburg,
at the Church of St. Nicholas, and that is where
Moore became assistant priest in eighteen eighteen. And as a
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side note, Moore did not get along with the parish
priest there, who accused him of, among other things, singing
songs which do not edify. The organist at the Church
of St. Nicholas was a man named Franz sovereg Gruber.
Gruber was born on November seven and his parents were
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linen weavers, but his real interest was in music, and
his teacher encouraged this interest and gave him some music
lessons outside of his regular studies. At first, Gruber went
into the family linen business, but when he turned eighteen,
his father gave him permission to find work as a teacher.
Gruber hoped that teaching would let him keep pursuing music.
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It was pretty common for teachers to also work as
church organists. He found an internship with another organist, and
he got his first job as a teacher in eighteen
oh seven. In eighteen eighteen, he was working as the
organist at the Church of St. Nicholas, along with working
as a school teacher, a church caretaker, and as organist
at another church. On Christmas Eve eighteen eighteen, More went
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to Gruber and asked him to write a melody to
go along with that poem he had written two years earlier.
More wanted something suitable for a choir with two soloists
accompanied by a guitar, and it's not totally clear what
prompted this request. One hypothesis is that the church organ
was broken. Today, there are a lot of really dramatic
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explanations for what was wrong with the organ, including a
mouse infestation that's really not uh substantiated in anyway, and
the fact that the organ was broken is really speculative.
Whatever the reason, Gruber wrote the music and presented it
to More on that same day, and Gruber described it
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as just a simple composition, but More was pleased enough
with it that he decided to include it as part
of that night's Christmas Eve mass. More sang the tenor
part and played the guitar, and Gruber sang the bass part.
Very little is known about this first performance on Christmas
Eve eighteen eighteen, but Gruber later described it as receiving
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quote general approval by all so still Enoch started out
as a simple song for Christmas Eve, with lyrics by
an assistant priest and a melody by a church organist.
This is what I really love about this story. These
were just regular people doing their regular work at their
local church, performing for a congregation of laborers and their families,
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all living at a place that had just come through
a war and was struggling economically. And in the years
that followed, the song continued to be performed all around
this part of Austria. There are surviving copies of the
music and lyrics that belonged to various teachers, choir directors, vickers,
and the like. By the eighteen thirties, the song had
started to spread beyond Austria, mostly through traveling groups of
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family singers. One was the Strasser family singers, who performed
the song in Leipzig in eighteen thirty two. A newspaper
article promoting the upcoming concert even said that the writer
hoped that they would sing stealen Knocht, meaning that by
that point the song had been performed there before. It
is not known exactly how and when the song spread
beyond Europe, but the Rayner family Singers started a North
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American tour in eighteen thirty nine, and they performed the
song on Christmas Day of that year. But in the
process of copying and passing along this music, people had
left off the attribution some more and Gruber. By the
eighteen fifties, folks were trying to figure out who had
written this song that at this point had become incredibly popular.
Word got back to Gruber about the search, and on
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December eighteen fifty four, he wrote his authentic account of
the origin of the Christmas carol Silent Night, Holy Night.
Of course it was really titled in German. By the
turn of the twentieth century, Silent Night had been performed
in one language or another on almost every continent. Today,
it has been translated into more than three hundred languages
(32:17):
and dialects. It's also remembered as one of the songs
sung during the Christmas Eve Truce in World War One.
In eleven, UNESCO designated it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage
being Crosby's ninety five version is reportedly the number three
best selling single of all time. You see that statistic
(32:37):
a lot. How they came up with it is a
little unclear, And of course More and grew were both
lived their own lives after that first performance of Silent
Night and their song becoming so popular. More moved from
parish to parish on various assignments, becoming known as a
social reformer in his later work as a parish priest,
and he died on December four, eight Gruber continued to
(33:01):
teach and work as an organist and a choir director.
He was married three times, remarrying after the deaths of
his first and second wives. He also had at least
twelve children, but only four lived to adulthood. One of them,
his son, Felix, followed in his footsteps as a composer
and a musician. Gruber died on June sixty three. The St.
(33:22):
Nicholas Church is no longer standing, but today there is
a chapel on the former site known as the Opendorf
Silent Night Chapel. The guitar that More played also still
survives and is in a museum. I find that whole
story kind of lovely, Just a simple story about a
simple song that has stayed around for two hundred years.
(33:43):
It is very sweet. I also, before we get into
some listener mail, I want to thank Christopher Hasciotis who
did some research for this Day in History class about
the first publication of a Christmas Carol, which became a
part of the research for that part of today episode.
So thanks Christopher. So you mentioned listener mail. Does that
(34:04):
mean you have it ready to roll? I knew I
have listener mail that is about the cable cars of
San Francisco and it is from Ian and said when
you did your research for this episode, you probably noticed
that a lot of cable car systems around the world
were developed from San Francisco system. This was before electric
street car technology took over. Dunedin, New Zealand, was the
(34:25):
first city to copy the San Francisco cable cars. It
too has a lot of steep streets, one of which
Baldwin Street, isn't the Guinness Book of World Records for
being the world's steepest residential street. Sadly, the system closed
in the nineteen fifties. Hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, has
a cable car. It originally used a cable system similar
to the San Francisco system, but in the late nineteen
(34:47):
seventies was rebuilt as a funicular type of cable car.
Like San Francisco, Wellington's cable car has been kept going
when it faced competition from other forms of transport because
it had become a tourist icon. Sad the same could
not be said for Wellington's other transport icon, the trolley
bus system. It closed in late despite being the last
(35:07):
regular commercial system in Australasia. Trolley buses are electric buses
which gets their power from overhead wires. Like street cars,
also known as trams do. A lot of cities around
the world replaced their street car systems with trolley busses
before they made the switch to diesel bustles for public transport. Glasgow, Scotland,
has the third oldest subway system in the world. When
(35:29):
it was first built, it used to cable cars because
electric technology was in its infancy and because regular steam
locomotives would have filled the tunnels with smoke. And Melbourne,
Australia is famous for now having the largest tram or
street car system in the world. However, the system started
out as a cable car system before being gradually upgraded
(35:49):
to electric. One guy I worked with on the railroad
here in Australia's told me that in his previous role
they were constantly digging up bits of old cable car
system as they did upgrades to the electric trams system.
Thank you once again, Ian, Thank you for this note. Ian.
I'm just gonna note again because I always do. I
don't sound like in Australian when I try to say Melbourne,
but that's because I'm not an Australian. What it's been
(36:13):
operating under the false pretense that you're from Australia this
whole time. No, it's so weird. Uh. So we've gotten
a number of notes from folks about various street car
and UM and cable car and tram systems, so thank
you so much for sending that. We also got a
question on Twitter, um because our our tweets about the
episode called the San Francisco system the oldest system of
(36:35):
its kind, so someone on Twitter also asked what exactly
of their kind meant because Lisbon has cable cars that
are like San Francisco's, and a helpful person chimed into
note that the San Francisco cars are the last manually
operated system in the world. The other systems in the world,
who have a very similar system of underground cables and
(36:58):
big wheels that turn the whole thing, are automatically operated
rather than manual at this point. So thank you for
that Twitter discussion. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, where a history
podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also all
over social media at missed in History. That is where
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can
(37:20):
go to our website, which is missed in History dot
com and find show notes for all the episodes Holly
and I have worked on together. Because of the nature
of this episode, it includes links to be able to
read the entirety of these works we talked about because
they're in the public domain now, and there's also a
searchable archive of every episode ever, so you can do
(37:41):
all of that at miss in history dot com, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, the
I Heart Radio app, and wherever you get podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Honley Frying. Today's podcast
is coming out on Christmas Eve, so it seems like
a good time to take a look at three creative
(00:24):
works that have become staples of the Christmas season. All
three of them have played a huge part and how
people observe and celebrate Christmas and parts of the world,
and they all happen to have milestone birthdays this year.
So A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens turned a hundred
and seventy five on December nineteen. The poem A Visit
(00:46):
from St. Nicholas turned a hundred nine on December Probably
we're going to talk a little bit about that too,
And then the song Still Knocked or Silent Night is
turning two hundred on the day that this episode comes out.
I will tell you that if you had asked me
before any of this research landing in my hand, I
(01:06):
would have reversed the order that I believed they were
in terms of age. You would have put the you
would have put Silent Night as the youngest one. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know why, but in my brain it seems newer.
I don't know why. Um I think I bet it
has to do with perception that I always see a
Christmas Carol or I have often seen a Christmas Carol
played out in old timey costumes, and that has been
(01:30):
the case with the other two. So in my head
those must be those must be the younger ones. I
think that's what it is. But we're going to start
with the youngest of these three works, and that is
Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in Prose being a Ghost
Story of Christmas, first published by Chapman and Hall on
December ninety three, and this novella begins with the author's
(01:52):
note quote, I have endeavored in this ghostly little book
to raise the ghost of an idea which shall not
put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other,
with the season, or with me. May it haunt their
houses pleasantly, And no one wished to lay it their
faithful friend and servant C. D. Today's readers may miss
(02:13):
the double meaning of to lay it, which meant both
to lay the book down and to lay the ghost
Dickens was raising to rest. Then the book moves on
to the relatively un Christmas e opening line of Marley
was dead to begin with, there is no doubt whatsoever
about that. Then it introduces Ebenezer Scrooge quote a tight
(02:33):
fisted hand at the grindstone, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,
covetous old center. There's also his jolly and kind hearted
nephew Fred, his ill treated employee, Bob Cratchett, cratch its son,
Tiny Tim, and the ghosts of Marley and the spirits
of Christmas past, present and yet to come. The story,
(02:55):
of course, follows Scrooge as he becomes a kinder and
more generous person through the intervention of all these spirits.
God bless us everyone. A Christmas Carol is commonly named
as one of the best selling books of all time,
but because of its age, that's actually pretty tricky to confirm,
and at this point there are also hundreds and hundreds
(03:16):
of adaptations across many genres and many types of media.
You can see flickers of it in everything from It's
a Wonderful Life to How the grinchtul Christmas and none
of this colossal popularity is New. When it was first
published in eighteen forty three, its first run of six
thousand copies sold out in just a week, and within
two months of its debut, eight different dramatic versions were
(03:39):
already being staged. But Charles Dickens didn't originally set out
to write a book when he wrote a Christmas Carol,
his original intent was a pamphlet. Earlier, in eighteen forty three,
he had read a report on child labor in Britain,
and he had also visited what he described as a
ragged school. Urbanization, industrialization and the eighteen thirty four Poor
(04:03):
Laws had all combined to create a system of really
devastating poverty in nineteenth century England. Conditions at a lot
of the factories were just appalling, and children employed in
the factories frequently did exhausting and dangerous work. This whole
system was also set up so that the poor were
forced to go work in workhouses, but the conditions at
(04:25):
those workhouses were so terrible into humanizing, that people would
do anything rather than to go there. Dickens thoughts on
all of this were certainly influenced by his own lived experience.
When he was a child, his father was placed in
a debtor's prison over an unpaid bakery bill. Dickens had
to leave school and work in a bootblacking factory. So
(04:48):
Dickens wanted to do something about all of this, and
he initially planned a pamphlet called an Appeal to the
People of England on Behalf of the poor Man's Child,
but he quickly decided that work of fiction might do
a better job of getting his point across than a pamphlet. Wood.
He also had a practical motivation to write a book
instead of a pamphlet. He flat out needed money. He
(05:12):
had just come back from a tour of the US
where he had been treated like a celebrity, but he
hadn't earned very much, so he needed to write a
work that would sell, and that meant a book, not
a pamphlet. He cranked out a Christmas Carol over just
a couple of months of writing, while also working on
the Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit as a serial.
He's described as basically the most famous writer living at
(05:35):
that moment. And so he went on this whole tour
of the US and Canada and was just hailed everywhere
that he went, but did not earn money. Off of it.
A Christmas Carol really synthesizes a lot that was going
on at the time that it was written. There's the
Victorian fascination with ghosts and the supernatural, the horrors of
(05:57):
poverty and morality. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge really embodies
commonly held attitudes towards the poor, seeing them as a
burden on society who just deserved the cruelties and degradations
of the workhouse. The celebration of Christmas in Britain was
also shifting during this time. Christmas trees, turkey dinners, decorating
(06:18):
with evergreens, gifts, and greeting cards were all becoming more
and more popular. So A Christmas Carol both reflected and
reinforced the Victorian idea of how to celebrate Christmas. It's
also credited with popularizing Merry Christmas as a Christmas greeting
and with the idea that there should be snow at Christmas.
Even though A Christmas Carol was an instant bestseller, Dickens
(06:42):
did not make nearly as much money with it as
he hoped, and this was mostly because of his own decisions.
He wanted this book to be really nice with fancy
gilded bindings and woodcuts and edgings and extravagant lettering. All
that stuff cost money. He even made last it changes
to the title and in pages of the books because
(07:02):
he wasn't satisfied with the original versions. All of this
was very expensive and cut very deeply into his profits.
That entire first printing only netted two thirty pounds, and
that was a fraction of the thousand pounds that he
had hoped to make off of this book. In its
first year, A Christmas Carol sold fifteen thousand copies, and
(07:24):
even after that he still was not anywhere close to
that thousand pound mark. It's like he needed a business
manager to explain, like how the ballance of of profit
works um And while the book was not a financial
success at all, it was incredibly well received. It was
nicknamed a new gospel. William make Peace. Thackeray described it
(07:46):
as quote a national benefit and to every man and
woman who reads it a personal kindness. It also appears
to have inspired exactly the kind of charitable mindset that
Dickens had hoped that it would when he just decided
to write it. The following spring, Gentleman's Magazine reported quote,
more extensive kindness has been dispensed to those who are
(08:08):
in want at the present season than at any preceding one.
Later on, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend that
after reading this book he wanted to quote go out
and comfort someone. And he insisted in the same letter
that the idea of not handing out money to people
who needed it was just nonsense. On top of all that,
a Christmas Carol launched the genre of Christmas books, It
(08:30):
also popularized the genre of Christmas ghost stories, although the
British tradition of telling ghost stories around a fire in
winter definitely predates Dickens's work. Dickenspace this disparity between how
his book was received and how much money he made
off of it with a lot of frustration. He summed
up his chagrin in a letter saying, quote, what a
wonderful thing it is that such a great success should
(08:52):
occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment. It took him
more than ten years after this book came out to
really get on stable financial footing. At the same time,
though he was genuinely glad that it inspired such a
wave of seasonal goodwill and really spread the idea that
employers had a duty not to be completely horrible to
their employees. I don't know why that tickles me, but
(09:15):
it does. Uh. Today, Dickens's original handwritten manuscript of a
Christmas Carol is at the Morgan Library and Museum in
New York City, and they put it on display there
every Christmas season. I don't think I have been at
the Morgan at exactly the time when they're showing it.
But when I realized that, I was like, do I
need to go to New York between now at the
(09:37):
end of the year. I don't think I do. We
will get into our next little piece of culture after
a quick sponsor break. People may know our next subject,
which is the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas by
another name The Night Before Christmas. A Visit from St.
(10:00):
Nicholas is sometimes also called an Account of a Visit
from St. Nicholas, and it was first published in The
Troy Sentinel of Troy, New York on December eighteen, twenty three.
This is the one that starts twas the Night before
Christmas went all through the house, not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse. The narrator and his wife and
the story are settling in Forbid when St. Nicholas arrives
(10:23):
in a miniature sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer. In
the first printing, they were named Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, comment, Cupid, Dunder,
and Blixum not blitzen. Uh. St Nicholas, not Honor is
described as chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.
He comes down the chimney with a bound. He fills
(10:44):
all the stockings with presents, and then he goes back
up the chimney before flying away, exclaiming Happy Christmas to
all and to all a good night. Similarly to how
a Christmas carol really reinforced and spread the way that
the Victorians were celebrating Christmas, this poem how a huge
effect on how people think about Christmas, especially St. Nick.
Among other things, a visit from St. Nicholas really cemented
(11:07):
jolly old St. Nick as this rotund and laughing person
with twinkling eyes and a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer
who comes into people's homes by sliding down the chimney.
That's not the first ever appearance of sliding down the chimney,
but it did really popularize all of that. And then
they're also the sugar plums, which went on to become
a prominent part of the Nutcracker suite in eight after
(11:31):
that first appearance of the poem, in eighty three, the
Troy Sentinel reprinted a Visit from St. Nicholas every year,
still anonymously. Over the years, it went through various edits,
mostly related to changes in spelling. For example, in earlier
editions of the poem, the narrator sprung from the bed,
but later he sprang, and of course dunder and Blixum
(11:53):
became dunder Mifflin. No, I'm kidding became Donner and blitzen Uh.
The poem was picked up in other public as well.
As this poem grew in popularity, people started writing into
the Troy Sentinel to talk about or to ask about,
who the author was. In eighteen nine, the paper printed
that they could only say that it was someone quote
(12:14):
by birth and residence to the city of New York,
and that he is a gentleman of more merit as
a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions.
Then in eighteen thirty seven, Charles Fenno. Hoffman published a
book called New York Book of Poetry, in which he
named the author of a Visit from St. Nicholas as
his friend, Clement Clark More. More was a scholar and
(12:38):
a professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York City,
where he taught subjects such as Hebrew and Greek literature.
His other works included a two volume compendious lexicon of
the Hebrew language. At first, More didn't really acknowledge Hoffman's
claim that he had written a Visit from St. Nicholas,
but in eighteen forty four he included the work in
(12:59):
an antiology of his poetry. He said that he had
written it for his children back in eighteen twenty two,
and that he had never intended for it to be
made public outside their family at all. The most common
explanation for how it came to be in the pages
of the Troy Sentinel was that a family friend named
Sarah Harriet Butler had visited that Christmas of eighteen twenty
(13:21):
two and taken a copy of this family poem home
with her, and then sent it to the Sentinel the
following year without telling more about it. In eighteen sixty two,
the librarian of the New York Historical Society asked More
to handwrite a copy of it for their collections, and
he did. You can see a scan of it online
at the New York Historical Society Museum and Library website.
(13:45):
At the time, the Society's librarian noted that when they
were discussing this request for a manuscript, Moore said his
inspiration for his depiction of St. Nick was quote, a
portly rubicund Dutchman living in the neighborhood. He wrote out
other copies the poem on request as well. However, there's
also a competing claim to the authorship of a visit
(14:06):
from St. Nicholas. Descendants of Major Henry Livingston Jr. Had
said that he, not More, was the one who wrote
the poem all the way back in roughly eighteen o eight,
a few years after the eighteen forty four anthology of
Moore's poetry came out, the Livingstone's learned about it, and
various members of the family started writing to each other
about how Moore was taking credit for their father or
(14:28):
grandfather's poem, depending on who was doing the writing, But
they didn't really go public with their allegations until the
early nineteen hundreds. By that point, all they really had
to go on with this claim was their family lore.
The family members who had said they had personal memories
of it had all died, and then Livingston himself had
been dead for sixteen years when Moore's anthology came out,
(14:51):
So even when that anthology came out, they could not
just go ask him, hey, is this the poem that
you wrote? There is no original handwritten copy of a
visit from St. Nicholas from eighteen o eight or eighteen
twenty two. The Livingston family said they had a manuscript
with handwritten notes, but that it was destroyed in a
fire around eighteen fifty nine. So this has spawned a
(15:13):
debate over who should actually get credit. Moore's supporters have
pointed out that the Troy Sentinel described the poet as
a scholar from New York City. More was a scholar
and was born in New York City, and when this
poem was first published, he was living in an estate
in Chelsea, Manhattan. Livingstone, on the other hand, was neither
(15:34):
a scholar nor from New York City. He was sort
of a gentleman farmer living in Poughkeepsie, roughly eighty miles
or a hundred and twenty nine kilometers north of New
York City. More supporters also questioned why More would take
credit for the poem if he didn't write it, going
so far as to write out copies for historical collections,
especially since he seemed kind of embarrassed that it had
(15:56):
even been published in the first place. More, as a detractor,
on the other hand, have contended that he was too
preachy and cranky to have written such a lighthearted poem,
and also that he hated children. They've also noted that
Moore's family members gave three completely different stories about what
inspired him to write it. One was that it was
written to cheer up a sun after he was thrown
(16:17):
from a horse and broke his leg. Another was that
he wrote it after having to go out on Christmas
Eve to find a turkey after the butcher didn't deliver their's,
And the last was that it was written after hearing
the bells jingling on his horse while traveling to his
Chelsea estate by slay. So they point to the existence
of these three disparate stories as a sign that none
(16:38):
of them are true. Some of those spelling changes made
to the poem over the years have also been brought
up as evidence that Moore did not write it, especially
dunder and blix Um to donner and Blitzen. Dunder and
Blixum is supposedly derived from the Dutch words for thunder
and lightning, and Livingstone spoke Dutch. However, Moore spoke German,
(17:00):
and donner und blitz is German for thunder and lightning. Ye,
dunder and donna are really the words for thunder. Neither
blicks him nor blitz in is exactly the word for lightning.
It's close in those two languages. Moore's detractors have also
brought up a handwritten note on the title page of
(17:22):
a book that he donated to the New York Historical Society.
The note says, by Clement Seemore a m. This book
is a translation of another work in Moore's detractors say
that this is evidence that he made a habit of
just taking credit for other people's work, but his supporters
counter that this note is not even in his handwriting,
(17:43):
and that it's probably not him trying to say I
translated this book, but it's just a notation written by
someone else. At the Historical Society to Mark, who donated
the book today. Livingstone supporters include Donald Foster of Vassar College,
who wrote author unn Own on the Trail of Anonymous
and McDonald P. Jackson of the University of Auckland, author
(18:06):
of who wrote The Night Before Christmas. Analyzing the Clement
Clark Moore versus Henry Livingston question. Both Foster and Jackson
ground their arguments in linguistic forensics, with Jackson's book having
such chapter titles as the Evidence of Meter, Statistical Interlude,
phoneme pairs, definite and indefinite articles, and favorite expressions, and
(18:27):
Quirks of style. Both of these men argue that the
poem uses language in a way that makes it more
likely to be Livingstone's than More's and Jackson's analysis the
most important part is quote the frequencies of common words
such as the on as at to that would and
some vocutions such as mania and in vain and phonyme
(18:51):
pairs comprised of the last phonetic symbol on in one
word in the first in the next. Jackson goes on
to state that these elements of land, which are not
easy to imitate and are outside the conscious control of
a writer after Foster's book Author Unknown was published, Historic
document dealer Seth Keller published a point by point rebubbal
(19:12):
of the various claims against Clement Moore as author of
a Visit from St. Nicholas, including Foster's forensic analysis. When
it comes to the more subjective claims of things like
More's temperament, Keller's response is sort of no, he wasn't
a jerky pedant who hated kids. Here are examples. But
when it came to the linguistic analysis, Caller contended that
(19:33):
Foster cherry picked the evidence that supported the idea that
Livingstone was the author, while discarding everything that did not
support his idea. Caller concludes unequivocally that Moore wrote the poem.
McDonald p. Jackson's book just came out in April of
twenties sixteen, so it is really new, and there really
has not been a lot of scrutiny into whether his
(19:55):
analysis holds up. I found one blog post on that
subject and nothing in any peer reviewed journal or anything
like that. The book Author Unknown as much older, so
there's been a lot more writing about whether those conclusions
are valid. However, it's important to note that there is
debate about whether linguistic forensics can reliably and conclusively identify
(20:17):
the author of a work at all, especially as the
field stands right now. The field itself is kind of
divided over this issue of can linguistic forensics conclusively identify
the author of an unknown work, and several of Foster's
other attempts to use forensic linguistics and criminal investigations have
(20:38):
been completely wrong. This includes falsely implicating the wrong man
in the September eleven anthrax attacks in the United States,
which led to a massive defamation suit. Keller, Jackson, and
Foster are just the latest round of people to weigh
in on this topic. It's been the subject of ongoing
debate since about and at this point. You will find
(21:00):
the poem attributed in a lot of different ways. Encyclopedia
Britannica's entry on the poem attributes it to neither man,
but acknowledges the issue of its authorship in a paragraph.
The Academy of American Poets lists More as the author,
as do various publications from the U S Library of Congress.
The Poetry Foundation confusingly has the poem on two different
(21:23):
pages on its website. One attributed to More and the
other attributed to Livingston. Livingstone's biography at the Poetry Foundation
lists him unequivocally as the author, while Moore's points out
the lack of concrete evidence in Livingstone's claim before saying,
scholars today give the credit to Livingstone. I don't know
what scholars are talking about. I am not a linguist.
(21:49):
I am not a forensic scientist. But as a poet,
I find the idea that you can conclusively determine who
with the author was of a five hundred thing word
poem with some computer analysis, I find that specious. I
was having a conversation with somebody about this yesterday, and
(22:10):
I think that forensic linguistics has the potential to someday
be sort of like fingerprinting in terms of identifying people,
but at this point it's a lot more like phrenology.
So that's my uh. I read a lot of very
frustrating charts of words in their use in different works
(22:31):
by Clemettmore and and Livingston, and I found it all
very frustrating. And as a side note, this is not
the only he said. She said back and forth about
the authorship of a Christmas classic. Medford Massachusetts and Savannah, Georgia,
to cities I cannot think of more different from one another,
have both claimed to be the place where James Purepont
(22:53):
wrote jingle Bells. They even have their own plaque about it,
each city having a plaque saying this is where where
he wrote jingle Bells. Over the last couple of years,
there's been a whole other argument raised about that author
or that location of where it was written, which is
that it might not be either of them. They might
both be wrong. Uh. Both cities, however, feel extremely passionately
(23:16):
about it, and we are going to move on to
something that that has a much clearer authorship after another
quick break. The song Studa Knocked, known in English as
Silent Night or a Silent Night Holy Night, was created
(23:37):
in the eighteen teens, and since neither Holly nor I
speak German, we do not want to traumatize people with
uh like preschool or ish attempt to read lyrics in German. Instead,
here is the beginning of the song from a nineteen
fourteen recording sung by Julia Culp Woo woo w. The
(25:05):
most common English translation of this song is by Episcopal
priest John Freeman Young, who was born in Pittston, Maine,
and later became Bishop of Florida. His eighteen fifty nine
version starts silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all
is bright round yon, Virgin Mother and Child, Holy Infant,
(25:25):
So tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in
heavenly Peace. The original German lyrics to Still An Act
were written by Joseph Moore. More had been born into
poverty in Salzburg on December eleventh, sevo and when he
was still a child, a local priest started mentoring him
(25:45):
and saw that he had a talent for music. This
priest helped him get an education, including studying music at
a Benedictine monastery. More also attended the Lyceum school in Salzburg.
In eighteen eleven, More entered eeminary, something that he had
to get a special dispensation to do because his parents
had not been married. He was ordained in eighteen fifteen,
(26:08):
and in eighteen sixteen he moved to the town of
mary up Far in Lungao in the Austrian Alps for
his first assignment as an assistant priest. And this area
was also where his father's family was from, and it
was where he wrote the poem that would become the
lyrics to Silent Night in eighteen sixteen. He never described
a specific inspiration for the poem, but Maria Far, which
(26:32):
translates to Mary's Parish, had been the spiritual and religious
heart of the Lungo region for centuries, and it had
also really really struggled in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.
It had been occupied by Bavarian troops, and those troops
were finally withdrawing at about the same time that more
started working there. So it makes a lot of sense
(26:52):
that all of this would come together to inspire a
poem about the Birth of Christ that prominently featured the
themes of peace, love and salvation. Working as an assistant
priest required more to move from place to place than
By eighteen eighteen, he had arrived in Oberndorf by Salzburg,
roughly eighty miles that's about a hundred and thirty kilometers
(27:13):
northwest of Maria Far on the Austrian border, and like
Maria Far, this region had been through its share of turmoil.
Starting in the thirteenth century. It had been part of
a state that was ruled by the prince archbishops of
the city of Salzburg, but in eighteen oh three it
had been forced to secularize. Then, after the Napoleonic Wars,
the Congress of Vienna drew a new border through the region,
(27:37):
and what had been its own entity was divided up
and absorbed into Austria and Bavaria. Part of this new
border followed the Salzac River, which ran directly through town,
and so what had been one municipality became Obendorf by Salzburg,
Austria on the east side of the river, and Laufen,
Bavaria on the west. The war had also affected the
(27:59):
salt trade, which was a major part of the local economy,
so laborers and boat builders, who made up most of
the population of Obendorff, were really struggling. After the new
border was drawn, a parish was established at Obendorf by Salzburg,
at the Church of St. Nicholas, and that is where
Moore became assistant priest in eighteen eighteen. And as a
(28:20):
side note, Moore did not get along with the parish
priest there, who accused him of, among other things, singing
songs which do not edify. The organist at the Church
of St. Nicholas was a man named Franz sovereg Gruber.
Gruber was born on November seven and his parents were
(28:40):
linen weavers, but his real interest was in music, and
his teacher encouraged this interest and gave him some music
lessons outside of his regular studies. At first, Gruber went
into the family linen business, but when he turned eighteen,
his father gave him permission to find work as a teacher.
Gruber hoped that teaching would let him keep pursuing music.
(29:01):
It was pretty common for teachers to also work as
church organists. He found an internship with another organist, and
he got his first job as a teacher in eighteen
oh seven. In eighteen eighteen, he was working as the
organist at the Church of St. Nicholas, along with working
as a school teacher, a church caretaker, and as organist
at another church. On Christmas Eve eighteen eighteen, More went
(29:25):
to Gruber and asked him to write a melody to
go along with that poem he had written two years earlier.
More wanted something suitable for a choir with two soloists
accompanied by a guitar, and it's not totally clear what
prompted this request. One hypothesis is that the church organ
was broken. Today, there are a lot of really dramatic
(29:46):
explanations for what was wrong with the organ, including a
mouse infestation that's really not uh substantiated in anyway, and
the fact that the organ was broken is really speculative.
Whatever the reason, Gruber wrote the music and presented it
to More on that same day, and Gruber described it
(30:07):
as just a simple composition, but More was pleased enough
with it that he decided to include it as part
of that night's Christmas Eve mass. More sang the tenor
part and played the guitar, and Gruber sang the bass part.
Very little is known about this first performance on Christmas
Eve eighteen eighteen, but Gruber later described it as receiving
(30:27):
quote general approval by all so still Enoch started out
as a simple song for Christmas Eve, with lyrics by
an assistant priest and a melody by a church organist.
This is what I really love about this story. These
were just regular people doing their regular work at their
local church, performing for a congregation of laborers and their families,
(30:49):
all living at a place that had just come through
a war and was struggling economically. And in the years
that followed, the song continued to be performed all around
this part of Austria. There are surviving copies of the
music and lyrics that belonged to various teachers, choir directors, vickers,
and the like. By the eighteen thirties, the song had
started to spread beyond Austria, mostly through traveling groups of
(31:11):
family singers. One was the Strasser family singers, who performed
the song in Leipzig in eighteen thirty two. A newspaper
article promoting the upcoming concert even said that the writer
hoped that they would sing stealen Knocht, meaning that by
that point the song had been performed there before. It
is not known exactly how and when the song spread
beyond Europe, but the Rayner family Singers started a North
(31:34):
American tour in eighteen thirty nine, and they performed the
song on Christmas Day of that year. But in the
process of copying and passing along this music, people had
left off the attribution some more and Gruber. By the
eighteen fifties, folks were trying to figure out who had
written this song that at this point had become incredibly popular.
Word got back to Gruber about the search, and on
(31:57):
December eighteen fifty four, he wrote his authentic account of
the origin of the Christmas carol Silent Night, Holy Night.
Of course it was really titled in German. By the
turn of the twentieth century, Silent Night had been performed
in one language or another on almost every continent. Today,
it has been translated into more than three hundred languages
(32:17):
and dialects. It's also remembered as one of the songs
sung during the Christmas Eve Truce in World War One.
In eleven, UNESCO designated it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage
being Crosby's ninety five version is reportedly the number three
best selling single of all time. You see that statistic
(32:37):
a lot. How they came up with it is a
little unclear, And of course More and grew were both
lived their own lives after that first performance of Silent
Night and their song becoming so popular. More moved from
parish to parish on various assignments, becoming known as a
social reformer in his later work as a parish priest,
and he died on December four, eight Gruber continued to
(33:01):
teach and work as an organist and a choir director.
He was married three times, remarrying after the deaths of
his first and second wives. He also had at least
twelve children, but only four lived to adulthood. One of them,
his son, Felix, followed in his footsteps as a composer
and a musician. Gruber died on June sixty three. The St.
(33:22):
Nicholas Church is no longer standing, but today there is
a chapel on the former site known as the Opendorf
Silent Night Chapel. The guitar that More played also still
survives and is in a museum. I find that whole
story kind of lovely, Just a simple story about a
simple song that has stayed around for two hundred years.
(33:43):
It is very sweet. I also, before we get into
some listener mail, I want to thank Christopher Hasciotis who
did some research for this Day in History class about
the first publication of a Christmas Carol, which became a
part of the research for that part of today episode.
So thanks Christopher. So you mentioned listener mail. Does that
(34:04):
mean you have it ready to roll? I knew I
have listener mail that is about the cable cars of
San Francisco and it is from Ian and said when
you did your research for this episode, you probably noticed
that a lot of cable car systems around the world
were developed from San Francisco system. This was before electric
street car technology took over. Dunedin, New Zealand, was the
(34:25):
first city to copy the San Francisco cable cars. It
too has a lot of steep streets, one of which
Baldwin Street, isn't the Guinness Book of World Records for
being the world's steepest residential street. Sadly, the system closed
in the nineteen fifties. Hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, has
a cable car. It originally used a cable system similar
to the San Francisco system, but in the late nineteen
(34:47):
seventies was rebuilt as a funicular type of cable car.
Like San Francisco, Wellington's cable car has been kept going
when it faced competition from other forms of transport because
it had become a tourist icon. Sad the same could
not be said for Wellington's other transport icon, the trolley
bus system. It closed in late despite being the last
(35:07):
regular commercial system in Australasia. Trolley buses are electric buses
which gets their power from overhead wires. Like street cars,
also known as trams do. A lot of cities around
the world replaced their street car systems with trolley busses
before they made the switch to diesel bustles for public transport. Glasgow, Scotland,
has the third oldest subway system in the world. When
(35:29):
it was first built, it used to cable cars because
electric technology was in its infancy and because regular steam
locomotives would have filled the tunnels with smoke. And Melbourne,
Australia is famous for now having the largest tram or
street car system in the world. However, the system started
out as a cable car system before being gradually upgraded
(35:49):
to electric. One guy I worked with on the railroad
here in Australia's told me that in his previous role
they were constantly digging up bits of old cable car
system as they did upgrades to the electric trams system.
Thank you once again, Ian, Thank you for this note. Ian.
I'm just gonna note again because I always do. I
don't sound like in Australian when I try to say Melbourne,
but that's because I'm not an Australian. What it's been
(36:13):
operating under the false pretense that you're from Australia this
whole time. No, it's so weird. Uh. So we've gotten
a number of notes from folks about various street car
and UM and cable car and tram systems, so thank
you so much for sending that. We also got a
question on Twitter, um because our our tweets about the
episode called the San Francisco system the oldest system of
(36:35):
its kind, so someone on Twitter also asked what exactly
of their kind meant because Lisbon has cable cars that
are like San Francisco's, and a helpful person chimed into
note that the San Francisco cars are the last manually
operated system in the world. The other systems in the world,
who have a very similar system of underground cables and
(36:58):
big wheels that turn the whole thing, are automatically operated
rather than manual at this point. So thank you for
that Twitter discussion. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, where a history
podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also all
over social media at missed in History. That is where
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can
(37:20):
go to our website, which is missed in History dot
com and find show notes for all the episodes Holly
and I have worked on together. Because of the nature
of this episode, it includes links to be able to
read the entirety of these works we talked about because
they're in the public domain now, and there's also a
searchable archive of every episode ever, so you can do
(37:41):
all of that at miss in history dot com, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, the
I Heart Radio app, and wherever you get podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Stuff Works dot com.
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Tracy Wilson
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