December 18, 2025 • 39 mins
For nearly 200 years, we have credited the most famous poem of the Christmas season to Clement Clarke Moore. But what if we got the wrong man?
This holiday season: A centuries old family feud, a bold claim from an English professor, and the true meaning of Christmas.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
There are some sure signs that the holidays have arrived.
The lights go up on main street of the town
where I live. People pull their coats a little tighter
around them as they go from shop to shop, and
my colleague, then the daf Haffrey, shows up to tell
me some absolutely crazy story about Christmas.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Twas the Night before Christmas. He and God and all
through the house not a creature was stirring, not even
a mouse. That's right.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
This, of course, is a visit from Saint Nicholas, more
commonly known as Twas the Night before Christmas, a poem
that Ben has let's just say, learned a little too
much about over the past few months.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Have you read the Stuart Little version of this, where,
to save Stuart's feelings, the Littles rewrite it as not
even a Laus, because I don't want it. This too
demeaning to my His poem's everywhere. It's in Stuart Little.
It's die hard presidents read this poem. The stockings were
hung by the chimney with care, in hopes the Saint
(01:26):
Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all
snug in their beds, while visions of sugar.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Sugar pumps danced in their heads.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm on her kerchief and I in my cap had
just settled our brains. Very weird choice of words there
for a long winters.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Now this went on for.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
What quick I knew in a moment it must be nick.
So this is this is the poem that creates, it
fully launches the modern Santa Claus. It's his, it's the
first time the reindeers are named. It's the first time
he gets eight and not one. And it's it. It
is the blueprint for American Christmas. Very everyone thinks Christmas
(02:06):
is this ancient thing. There's no ever since that Jesus
Christ was born on December twenty fifth. The whole thing
is this invented tradition, and it is this poem that
gives us the modern American Christmas. Written by Clement Clark
Moore in eighteen twenty two, published in Upstate New York
and The Troy Sentinel in eighteen twenty three.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Until you mentioned this to me, hadn't fully understood how
extraordinary this accomplishment of this poem is. I don't even
like Christmas, I could guests.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
So we've established this in prior versions of our Christmas.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Episode, I can get halfway through that from memory. I
suspect that an insanely high percentage of Americans can get
a significant way into this poem from memory.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I would stake my life on the fact that more
people this is the only poem that most people know totally.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Agree total, And I was going to say that an
incredibly higher percentage of people of Americas not only know
this poem from memory, but no other poems at this
length from memory absolutely yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, so, but the first thing people would have read
of the Night Before Christmas is not even the poem.
In fact, it begins it is introduced by an editor's
note that starts with the line we know not to
whom we are indebted for the following description of that
unwearied patron of children dot dot Santa Claus. Yeah, it
starts by acknowledging that they don't know who wrote it.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
So it begins with an authorship mystery, and the authorship
mystery persists.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yes, so I propose to end it here today.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things
overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today we bring you
our annual holiday spectacular, which this year is not about
sugar plums, but about a historic theft, a literary crime
(04:02):
that begins with a bold accusation. For nearly two hundred years,
have we your TRIPU did this immensely famous poem to
the wrong person? My colleague bend Adaf Haffrey has a story. Oh,
one last thing. If you're listening with young children familiar
(04:25):
with Santa Claus, this episode might challenge their sense of reality,
Proceed with caution.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Sometime in the late nineteen nineties, a woman named Mary
van Dusen logged onto the Internet. She was looking up
her great great great great great grandfather, Major Henry Livingston junior.
That's right, seven generations back, and while browsing the World
Wide Web, she came across a piece of information that
changed the course of her life.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
One of the pages that came up was just a
very short little page, but it said two things. It
said that Henry Livingston was a possible author of Night
before Christmas, and it said that he had named his
reindeer for the horses in his stable. Who would believe it?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Henry Livingston Junior was a gentleman farmer and poet from
a prominent early American family. He was reputed to be
a great lover of Christmas, and, crucially for our purposes today,
not Clement Clark Moore, the person who had claimed authorship
of the poem not long after its publication, and who
for almost two centuries the general public has believed wrote it.
(05:37):
So to Marry and others in her family, it seemed
he was also the victim of a historic injustice. Just
a couple decades after a visit from Saint Nicholas, the
poem was published, his granddaughter came across a best selling
holiday edition and saw the author's name clearly printed, Clement
Clark Moore, at which point she brought it in a
(05:58):
hurry to her mother, Henry's daughter in law, who said,
someone has made a mistake. Clement Moore did not write
the night before Christmas. Your grandfather, Henry Livingston wrote it.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
They saw a wrong that needed to be writed.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
So then you start looking at this right now. Henry
had never claimed authorship himself, but he died in eighteen
twenty eight, so no one could ask him about it.
But the family remembered it as Henry's poem, and they
took it upon themselves to do the research to prove
it to the world, and so began the Great Livingston Quest.
(06:32):
This is Montague's and Cabulot's Hatfield and McCoy's Christmas Edition.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
The first person took it up were the children of Catherine,
my fourth grade grandmother, so I was always pleased about that.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
At the beginning, all the family had was recollection relatives
who said that Henry Livingston Junior had read the poem
aloud to them when they were kids, but they needed
to establish a record. The gold standard would be a
copy of the poem written in Henry's hand.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
Decided they would collect as many pieces of paper as
they could, and this is really a godsend because they
were able to contact two of Henry's children before they died.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
They heard that someone had gotten a copy of the
poem that had Henry's handwriting on it, and do we
have it today or no.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
We don't because they're living on the frontier and the
original burned in one of the house fires.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
But the livingstones didn't quit. When we talked, Mary walked
me through the generations of people who've taken up the quest.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Since The next search for proof of Henry's authorship is
from Henry Livingstone, a babylon Long Island.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I began to understand that this search was a kind
of Livingstonian rite of passage, something handed from generation to
generation like a precious gemstone, or like a feudal title,
a matter of destiny.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Having your name in your birth announcement as having to
research night before Christmas puts burden on your shoulders that
is very heavy.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
After all, this is an eminent family. The genealogical tree
Mary has put together includes George H. W. Bush W
and Jeb as well as a congressman and a mayor
of New York. Eleanor Roosevelt was also in the mix somehow.
But alongside the campaigns and inaugurations, there is a single
golden thread, the authorship question. And I think part of
(08:41):
that fixation must have had to do with what poetry
meant at the time. Malcolm and I talked about that
over a glass of agnog at the annual Revision's History
Holiday party.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
One of the things that interests me it is a
poem created in a very specific moment in time, the
early nineteenth century, and because poetry plays a role in
public life in back then in a way that it
doesn't know.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Right, Well, some newspapers are the mass the mass medium, right,
there's not television, radio, recorded sound doesn't exist. So you
have poems all over the place in newspapers and they
are there.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
They are off, they.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Can be satirical, they can be funny. They're these very concise,
pithy ways of expressing popular sentiments. And the ones that
are really gonna give you a good example, yeah, please.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
My mom grew up in Jamaica during the Second World War,
has all these hilarious poems written about the Second World
War from a Jamaican perspective. My favorite this one might
be an it might be an English one. You know,
there are all these Americans come over in our station
in England before the D Day. So she would as
a kid, my mom would recite this one, the gum
(09:53):
chewing ink and the cut chewing cow, very alike. The
difference somehow, what is the difference? I've got it now,
the intelligent look on the face of the cow. But
it's to the point, right right that a lot of
these what but the users trying to navigate is the
indignity of this huge country of what people they consider
(10:16):
to be their inferiors, uncultured coming and saving their bacon. Right,
it's humiliating, and how do they make sense of that humiliation?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
To these poems?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Poems are doing all this.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Work very much like I'm almost like a meme today
where it's like you see a thing and you're like,
that gets it, that somehow ineffably puts its finger right
on the pulse. Yeah, And the pulse this poem had
its finger on was that there was a crisis of Christmas.
At the very moment of its publication.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
Before the visit trend from Saint Nick, Christmas was celebrated
in a very different way.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize, shortlisted the Battle
for Christmas in his book. He argues that Christmas was
always about these social inversions. So lower class people would
live like kings for the best food, the best ale presents,
provided they were peasants from then on. But those traditions
were better suited to grand old country estates where everyone
(11:19):
knew each other and kind of accepted where they fit
in the pecking order. That was not the case in
modern American democratic cities.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something
of a cross between Halloween and New Year's Eve because
of what amount to trick or treat. Bands of young men,
most of them pour from the working classes, went roving
around town. They'd stop at the more prosperous homes where
(11:51):
they'd ask for food and alcohol. But if they didn't
get what they wanted, they would ostentatiously withhold that goodwill,
or they might even threaten to do some small damage.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Christmas was getting out of control, and so a group
of elite New Yorkers took the matter in hand.
Speaker 5 (12:12):
We're talking about a small group of people who call
themselves Knickerbackers, after the Dutch origins of the city. But
this was a kind of identity that they tried on
to create again a sense of the good old days
of New York when the classes did get along and
the meshing worked very well.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
The Knickerbockers were a conservative organization trying to invent new
American traditions and also great names for basketball teams go NIXX,
and they found a figurehead for their new version of
Christmas in Saint Nicholas of Myra, patron Saint of merchants, bakers, brides,
the falsely accused.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
And children.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
In the eighteen twenties, the lines between Saint Nicholas and
the sort of scary figure of Santa Claus, a mythological
gift giver, began to blur. But how were the Knickerbockers
going to unleash this new invention upon the huddled masses.
The answer came in eighteen twenty three with the poem
we've been talking about in this episode, five hundred and
(13:12):
forty two words about a guy named Saint Nicholas terrifying
a well to do father by showing up in the
middle of the night and instead of demanding the best
grog in the house, leaving a bunch of presents, exactly
the kind of poem Clement Clark Moore, an eminent New
Yorker and friend of the Knickerbockers, would write at precisely
that moment. Moore was a Bible scholar. He lived on
(13:33):
an estate in Manhattan called Chelsea, which later did in
fact become the neighborhood of Chelsea.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
The New Christmas that Clement Clark Moore was promulgating continued,
in a very innocent way, the old social inversion, but
in this case it wasn't the rich changing places with
the poor. It was the grown ups changing places with
the kids. So the children have really replaced the working
(14:03):
class in the new Christmas.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
This was a version of Christmas that worked, and it
just got bigger. Clement Moore's estate shrank, but his legend
and the legend of his poem grew until the Livingstons
caught wind of it. The problem was that, despite all
their efforts, no Livingstone had been able to turn up
any conclusive, historical or documentary evidence proving beyond a reasonable
(14:28):
doubt that Henry Livingston Junior had written the poem. But
what if there was another approach? An ancestor of Mary
van Dusen's hit upon this idea in a letter from
the nineteen twenties. She had been interviewed for an article
in the Christian Science Monitor on the authorship question, one
of the first times this claim that Henry Livingston Junior
(14:49):
had written the poem went national. This, it turned out,
was kind of a jarring experience for her, so she
wrote to her cousin William, who'd set the whole thing up.
Speaker 5 (14:59):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I am writing from my bed. I could not sleep
last night, and thinking over our conversation, I got drawn
into this cross examination, which was quite inquisitorial in its nature.
For the problematical authorship of that poem. It is a
very delicate question to handle, and I am not at
all in favor of a writer for a Christian science
paper handling it. It ought to be touched on, very delicately,
(15:22):
and by some man of eminent literary attainments. Wait till
you find the fit man to do it. We relatives
would only have dirt thrown at us by press and people,
for see Moore is a demigod almost in their eyes.
Almost a century has this fetish been adored. And I
will not have myself or my family mixed up in it.
(15:42):
It is too delicate a subject to be dragged and
raked about except with great tact and reverence. Wait till
you get someone of high literary merit to write about
the authorship. Do not make this any but a first
class writer. End quote. Without documentary proof, the Livingstones needed
to make a stylistic argument that this poem sounded like
(16:04):
Livingstin and not like more and only someone of literary
attainments could really land it. The Living Stones would wait
nearly eighty years until Mary van Dusen came across that website,
took up the family quest and found such a scholar.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
At last, I figured I needed a poetry expert, so
I went to the internet and I looked at a
archive poetry. I saw Ian Lancashire as the expert of
the website and sent to email and I said, I
have this problem.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
What do I do?
Speaker 4 (16:45):
And he said, you find Don.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
When we're back. Don the man ab eminent literary attainments
and the very best thing the Livingstons could ever hope
to find in their stockings. It's the week before Thanksgiving,
(17:18):
the year two thousand. A group of people file into
a bookstore in Washington, d C. To have their very
sense of reality challenged. The event aired on c SPAN.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Thanks is great to be with you this evening.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
This is Don Foster. At the time, he was an
English professor at Vassar. He's straight out of Central Casting
Laser khakis, tie handsome in a dead poet's Society kind
of way. When he makes a particularly devilish point, he
shrugs his shoulders almost imperceptibly as his eyes wander to
the corner of his great big glasses, as if to say,
(17:53):
do I dare to eat a peach. Do I dare
disturb the universe?
Speaker 5 (17:58):
I do.
Speaker 6 (17:59):
My office is what you would expect in English professor's
office to be piled high with student papers and with
writings I have studied by poets and play rights. I'm
still unknown, but intermixed with the literary text are others
by Felon Zealotz or Nameless resent Nix, whose identity your
actions were of sufficient interest for someone to ask who
(18:21):
wrote this thing?
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Professor Foster made his name arguing that an anonymously published
poem called a Funeral Elegy was actually written by William Shakespeare.
He'd used modern computer analysis to argue it so forcefully
that anthologies were updated and the press took note. Foster's
phone began to.
Speaker 6 (18:42):
Ring, Professor, do you know that you're going to be
on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?
And I said, well, Professor, a star was born.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Foster practiced a kind of forensics called literary attribution. The
premise was that each of us has a style, a
kind of fingerprint in the way we write that, if revealed,
would prove conclusively that we wrote something. Dusting for that
fingerprint relied on two key methodologies. First, computer analysis, where
statistic patterns could be detected in an author's work, kind
(19:12):
of like large language models. Now a second, an investigator
would marshal their own powers of close reading. For instance,
just weeks after the Shakespeare story blew Up, Foster was
asked to identify the anonymous author of a dish novel
called Primary Colors, a thinly veiled account of the Clinton campaign.
Foster had a list of suspects. He fed samples of
(19:34):
their writing into his computer and began to look closely
at how the book was written. The anonymous writer showed
a preference for adverbs with l y endings like vaguely.
He used dashes to make compound words like triple back
over somersault and pander pirouette.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
He liked zany adjectives.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
His pros thought Foster revealed certain racial ideas, and all
those signs pointed clearly to the journalist Joe Klein. Foster
nailed it. Klin eventually fessed up, and this was when
things started to get weird for the professor.
Speaker 6 (20:09):
And at that point prosecutors and defenders and police and
other investigators saw in my work application that I had
not really thought of myself questioned. Documents in criminal cases
and other kinds of anonymous libels Harris mensa were suddenly
being sent to me and saying, can you figure out
(20:30):
who wrote this?
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Soon Foster was teaching my day and by night working
the Unibomber case, the John Benet Ramsay case, the Anthrax case,
and few major news items of the late nineteen nineties
were beyond the literary forensics.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
Single was Don Foster a report at Monica Lewinsky wrote
the three page document.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So I now go back and ask the question, did
she really?
Speaker 3 (20:53):
The crowd in the bookstore is wrapped around his finger,
and that's when he starts talking about Mary van Dusen,
the great great great great great granddaughter of Major Henry
Livingston junior.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
I got a phone call in August of nineteen I
twenty nine from a woman who said that she thought
that her ancestor wrote The Night before Christmas, not Clement
Clark Moore.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Mary and Don teamed up. She traveled the country searching
for proof every version of the Night before Christmas that
was ever written. She made a corpus of Henry's work.
She got a microfilm machine for her house for her
house and read every single newspaper she could find from
seventeen seventy five to eighteen thirty. In order to establish
a documentary record, she put it all on a website,
(21:39):
which ran ultimately to over fifteen thousand pages by her account,
in hopes that Don could do his detective work and
find an answer, and he did. He began to look
into questions of style, just like he did with primary colors.
What sort of adjectives were used, what kind of adverbs,
what sort of attitudes were expressed? He compared a visit
(22:01):
from Saint Nicholas to other poems by Moore and Livingstone.
Hundreds of thousands of words had been written on this subject,
and we all have all lace to get to. So
I'm going to be selective about what we talk about here.
But a good example of the case he made is
the question of anapestic to trameter, an extremely tedious matter that,
(22:22):
of course, is the only thing Malcolm wanted to talk
about when I saw him.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I want to be in the graduate seminar with you
where this poem is taking seriously.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Okay, let's let's let's uh, let's break down the formal
qualities of this poem. First, there's the meter, which is
sort of the crucial thing here. This poem is in
a extremely popular meter used for light versus satire called
anipestic to trameter.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
So give it rhythmically, give me lines at show.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Twas the night before Christmas went all through the house,
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Da
da dum da da dumba so.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Dumbda d d.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Dump.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And you, as a parent might be familiar with this
from like all of Doctor SEUs, So like Horton, here's
a who on the fifteenth of May and the jungle
of newle and the heat of the day and the
cool of the pool he was splashing, and you know
this kind of like it trips off the tongue. An
anipest is aligne. It's two unstressed syllables and a stressed one.
So it's dadda dumb, dadda dumb. That's like a dadda dumb.
(23:18):
That's an anipest to trameter tetra from the Latin for four.
It means there's four of those per line of an
anipestic to trameter. It's such an infectious meter. It's easier
to memorize and so it can transmit through word of
mouth much more easily, which is what happens with this
this poem as well. In fact, it is it's it's
so good for the spoken word that the way many
(23:39):
people probably know it today other than to was the
night before Christmas is the way I am by eminem
was the night before Christmas, and all through the house
it's like it's it just like it hooks you in.
(24:03):
So Foster alleged that More was way too serious to
be a big anipestic to Trameter. He says that Moore
condemned the quote depraved taste in poetry of those who
read anipestic satire end quote. In essence, Livingstone was way
more likely to write an anipest than More, not least
of all because he was just a really fun guy.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
Here's a little sample of Henry Livingston's verse. This is
why he closes one of his many Christmas and New
Year's poems, but his time that I bid you goodbye
till next year by wishing you happiness, peace and good cheer.
And he has the kind of poem after poem after
poem in this vein many of them Christmas or New
Year's poems.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Then he turns his attention to Clement Clark Moore.
Speaker 6 (24:45):
Clement Clark Moore I thought was pretty Santa Claus kind
of guy too, But as it turns out, this is
part of the lore that's arisen after his name was
associated with the poem.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
It was quite the curmudgeon.
Speaker 6 (24:55):
One might even say scrooge, I might even say grinch.
He writes things like humble the praise and trifling the regard,
whichever way upon the moral barred. And then he goes
on to scold women for wearing cosmetics or to unchastised
children for being too noisy.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Quite a severe man.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
So, according to Foster, on the one hand, we have
a good cheer to the ladies kind of guy, and
then there's the grinch scrooge. You could say maybe Moore
didn't stand a chance just based on this character assassination.
But there was more. In his book, Foster compared the
two men further. Henry Livingston Junior fought for independence, Clement
(25:34):
Moore was allegedly a slave owner. Livingston was a quote
friend of the Indians. Moore descended from the guy who
talked the Mohawks into selling Long Island and stylistically even
setting aside the slam dunk of the anapestic tetramoner, the
poem is Livingston all over the use of the adverbial
all as in the children were nestled, all snug in
their beds, and then some funny business with the reindeer names.
(25:57):
It all looked very, very suspicious. Don Foster, the man
of eminent literary attainments, had apparently solved the mystery. At
law last, the press went wild.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
Finally tonight, the mystery of a visit from Saint Nicholas.
It has been a holiday tradition since eighteen twenty two.
But who really wrote the famous poem?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
He was in the New York Times twice. He was
on network television.
Speaker 7 (26:27):
Don Foster is sort of a literary sleuth. He was
the one who discovered journalist Joe Klein was the anonymous
author of the bestseller Primary Colors. He studies the author's
words and styles, and in this case he says, Henry
Livingston's literary fingerprints are all over. The night before Christmas.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Don Foster's argument spread The city of Troy, whose newspaper
famously first published the poem, hosted as a kind of
Christmas media event, a mock trial in a real courtroom,
presided over by a former New York Supreme Court judge
and argued by actual lawyers on the question of who
wrote the poem. As the Jerry reached a verdict, Jerry
and Edgeley decided that the author was Ane for Christmas Is.
(27:21):
This prompted the Mayor of Troy to issue a proclamation
quote that December twenty third, twenty fourteen is Henry Livingston
Junior Day and Troy, New York. Famous musicians have reportedly
announced on stage that Henry Livingston Junior is the real
author of the poem. The Freaking Poetry Foundation website has
a page for Henry Livingston Junior, crediting him as the
(27:42):
author of the poem. Unambiguously. This is not ubiquitous, but
through Don Foster, Mary van Duzen, and the Livingstons had
achieved something her ancestors could only ever have dreamed of.
And even if people stopped short of denying Moore's authorship everywhere,
people began to question it. After nearly two centuries of injustice,
(28:05):
the Livingston family quest was paying.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
Off to myself come around to the view and that
this whole family legend was right in fact has I
think finally been vindicated, and Bible professors claimed to this poem,
I think is not just highly suspect, but waiting to
see what the opposition might have to say.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Oh but the opposition was watching, and they didn't like
what they saw. A couple of months ago, I visited
Seth Kaller, a famed dealer of historic documents in White Plains,
(28:52):
New York. Statues of Abraham Lincoln were strewn about the office.
Advanced copies of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
An original Prince of the Constitution hung on the wall
the Constitution I Have a Dream twas the night before Christmas.
Speaker 8 (29:09):
At the time the controversy erupted because of Don Foster's book,
I owned what was thought to be the only copy
in private hands, written by Clemency Moore.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Caller became embroiled in the authorship.
Speaker 8 (29:23):
Question, and so a New York Times reporter called me
and asked me about it, And you know, I said,
I didn't know, let me look into it. And I
was totally open minded. I mean, if I had been convinced,
I would have changed my description of it and or
mentioned the controversy. But the more I got into it,
you know, the more upset I got by the dishonesty
(29:48):
of the arguments made against Clement Moore. So I kept
going even after I thought this is sufficient to you know,
make the case.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
You did send me quite a long document in preparation
for this conversation.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, and I could have sent you a lot more.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Caller began to go through the claims in Don Foster's book,
and he soon found that most of them, We're deeply suspicious.
The comparable phraseology that table confused me. Would you? Would
you explain the origin of that table?
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Let me find it?
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Caller got out of binder stuffed with papers. Nobody is
taking this matter lightly. In fact, we spent an entire
afternoon going through this. Let's stick to the big ticket
items today first style. More wouldn't write like this, but
Caller showed me a chart comparing parts of the poem
with other poems More had written.
Speaker 8 (30:39):
Here's another from another one of his writings, Twas an
autumnal morn, celestial bright, the all Snug and from something else.
In The Snug and Tidy Night before Christmas, he talks
about visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
One of the rhymes in Night.
Speaker 8 (30:56):
Before Christmas is a clatter and matter, and in another
poem is.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Words, feelings, thought phrases.
Speaker 8 (31:04):
These would all be evidence that More could have written
the Night Before Christmas, and in fact did write the
Night Before Christmas, as opposed to you know, just making
the arguments that he couldn't have because he didn't use
these for these words.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
So maybe Livingston as author can't be proven stylistically, But
that's not all he and his colleagues found. The historical
argument about when Henry would have needed to write the
poem in order to be the author didn't line.
Speaker 8 (31:31):
Up either, But the fact that all of the stories
that the Livingston family have told can be actually disproven.
You know, oh, was taken by a nanny, and then
you prove that, well, then nanny wasn't there for another
eight years.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Also suspect Foster's finding that Moore was a humorless scrooge,
which was often a clear case of taking something More
had written out of context.
Speaker 8 (31:55):
What I found wasn't just that it was misinterpreted, but
that it was elited to the point where if you
just read the full sentence, it actually proves the opposite
of what is being used to.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Argue Now.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I can't know the mind of Don Foster, but there
were at least a few examples of his attributions not
exactly panning out. A couple of years after his book
Author Unknown came out, he retracted his famous claim that
Shakespeare had written the Funeralogy, under mounting skepticism, and after
he wrote an article seeming to suggest an innocent government
(32:35):
scientist was responsible for sending the anthrax letters after September eleventh,
he was sued for libel, settled for some undisclosed amount
of money, and went back to being predominantly a vasser
English professor. I had hoped to interview him for this story,
but he declined to speak with me through a colleague.
He'll keep Christmas in his way, and I'll keep it
(32:55):
in mind. But in my view, Foster's argument has done
a grave injustice to Clement Clark Moore that we, the
staff of Revisionist History and associates in the Rare Documents trade,
refused to leave unchallenged.
Speaker 8 (33:08):
And his book Arthur Unknown is still referred to and
still used by, you know, people who are looking into it.
And then so many other reporters go with it as
the story if he said she said that. I don't
blame the family as much as I blame some of
the scholars who should know better.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
But it does still bother.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
Me, Like if I bring up or the last time
I did was years ago, bring up the idea of
a museum exhibit and Clement Moore's authorship. Some accept it outright,
but others have been, well, we have to be careful,
we have to talk about the controversy. No, you know,
you have to acknowledge that there was one, but you
should not pretend that it's actually real.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Christmas is all about your dreams coming true. Maybe Foster
tried to do that for Mary, But to my mind,
in the end, I think what they set in motion
was a satisfying and to the mystery, it just wasn't
the conclusion they'd hoped for.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
It's fine with me that you come to a different
position than I do. I don't ever say flatly that
Henry wrote the poem. I say, I believe that Henry
wrote the poem, and here's the data, and make up
your own mind. So if you use it to come
(34:33):
to a different conclusion than I do, that's fine. At
least you examine the issue and you feel peace in
yourself at the answer you come to.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Then, was there was there one bit of evidence set
for you really sealed the case.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Yeah. This whole argument against Clenen Clark Moore relies on
the idea that he's a scrooge who would never write
about Christmas. He would never never write light verse, never
write about fairies, certainly never write about Santa Claus and Christmas.
And these researchers found not just one, but two effectively
(35:19):
Christmas poems by Clement Clark Moore that pre date or
are in tight sequence with a Visit from Saint Nicholas.
So the first is a letter called from Saint Nicholas,
which is literally in the voice of Santa Claus to
Clemic Clark Moore's kid, which I guess, true to his haters,
is about why she's not getting any presents that year,
though it is very sweet and crucially it's an anithestic determiner.
(35:43):
But this one is the one that I actually really love.
The Melville scholar Scott Norsworthy thinks that this poem and
a Visit from Saint Nicholas were written at the same time.
There was a snowstorm in New York on December twenty first.
Was a Saturday in eighteen twenty two, Throughoute this poem
(36:05):
called lines, written after a snowstorm.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
I'll read it to you.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Come, children, dear, and look around. Behold how soft and
light the silent snow has clad the ground in robes
of purest white. The trees seem decked by fairy hand
nor knead their native green, and every breeze appears to
stand all hushed to view the seam. You wonder how
the snows are made that dance upon the air, as
if from purer worlds they strayed so lightly and so fair.
(36:35):
Perhaps they are the summer flowers in northern stars, that
bloom wafted away from icy bowers to cheer our winter's gloom.
Perhaps they are feathers of a race of birds that
live away in some cold, dreary, wintry place, far from
the sun's warm ray and clouds. Perhaps are downy beds
on which the winds repose, who, when they rouse their
(36:56):
slumbering heads, shake down the feathery snows. But see, my darlings,
while we stay and gaze with fond delight the fairy scene.
Soon fades away and mocks our raptured sight, and let
this fleet eating vision teach truth. You soon must know
that all the joys we here can reach are transient
as the snow.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
They say something.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Christmas is a made up holiday. The core of it
is these weird social inversions that last for a day
and then melt like the new fallen snow. In that sense,
I think it's easy to see why the story that
Henry Livingston Junior actually wrote this poem gets retold so often.
It's another Christmas ee inversion, one about as old as
(37:42):
modern Christmas itself, just another story about a thing that's
not as it seems. Fat men in velvet robes sliding
down thin chimneys, everything you ever wanted under a tree
that's indoors, and your great great great great great grandfathers
forgotten roll in inventing Christmas. I don't believe it, but
(38:06):
then again tis the season. Revisionist History is produced by
me Bennatt of Haffrey, with Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan.
Our editor is Karen Schakergie fact checking by Onica Robbins.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke
(38:30):
Lehmand engineering by David Herman at Good Studios and Nina
Bird Lawrence. Original music was composed, arranged, and recorded by
Luis Gara, mixing and mastering bar Marcelo di Olivera. I
have stood on the shoulders of giants for this absurd episode.
All credit to the scholars and writers who made this possible,
(38:50):
Scott Norsworthy of the Melvileana Blog, Tom Jerman, and Justin Fox.
To our friends in Troy, the incomparable Duncan Crairie and
city historian Kathy Shehan. If I've left you unconvinced about
Moore's authorship, you can read the latest salvo from the
Livingstonians in the book Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas
by Professor MacDonald P.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Jackson.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Just be sure to read Scott Norseworthy's response to it
on the Melvilliana Blog right afterwards. From Revisionist History, Happy
holidays and we'll see you all in the new year.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
There are some sure signs that the holidays have arrived.
The lights go up on main street of the town
where I live. People pull their coats a little tighter
around them as they go from shop to shop, and
my colleague, then the daf Haffrey, shows up to tell
me some absolutely crazy story about Christmas.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Twas the Night before Christmas. He and God and all
through the house not a creature was stirring, not even
a mouse. That's right.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
This, of course, is a visit from Saint Nicholas, more
commonly known as Twas the Night before Christmas, a poem
that Ben has let's just say, learned a little too
much about over the past few months.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Have you read the Stuart Little version of this, where,
to save Stuart's feelings, the Littles rewrite it as not
even a Laus, because I don't want it. This too
demeaning to my His poem's everywhere. It's in Stuart Little.
It's die hard presidents read this poem. The stockings were
hung by the chimney with care, in hopes the Saint
(01:26):
Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all
snug in their beds, while visions of sugar.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Sugar pumps danced in their heads.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm on her kerchief and I in my cap had
just settled our brains. Very weird choice of words there
for a long winters.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Now this went on for.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
What quick I knew in a moment it must be nick.
So this is this is the poem that creates, it
fully launches the modern Santa Claus. It's his, it's the
first time the reindeers are named. It's the first time
he gets eight and not one. And it's it. It
is the blueprint for American Christmas. Very everyone thinks Christmas
(02:06):
is this ancient thing. There's no ever since that Jesus
Christ was born on December twenty fifth. The whole thing
is this invented tradition, and it is this poem that
gives us the modern American Christmas. Written by Clement Clark
Moore in eighteen twenty two, published in Upstate New York
and The Troy Sentinel in eighteen twenty three.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Until you mentioned this to me, hadn't fully understood how
extraordinary this accomplishment of this poem is. I don't even
like Christmas, I could guests.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
So we've established this in prior versions of our Christmas.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Episode, I can get halfway through that from memory. I
suspect that an insanely high percentage of Americans can get
a significant way into this poem from memory.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I would stake my life on the fact that more
people this is the only poem that most people know totally.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Agree total, And I was going to say that an
incredibly higher percentage of people of Americas not only know
this poem from memory, but no other poems at this
length from memory absolutely yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, so, but the first thing people would have read
of the Night Before Christmas is not even the poem.
In fact, it begins it is introduced by an editor's
note that starts with the line we know not to
whom we are indebted for the following description of that
unwearied patron of children dot dot Santa Claus. Yeah, it
starts by acknowledging that they don't know who wrote it.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
So it begins with an authorship mystery, and the authorship
mystery persists.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yes, so I propose to end it here today.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things
overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today we bring you
our annual holiday spectacular, which this year is not about
sugar plums, but about a historic theft, a literary crime
(04:02):
that begins with a bold accusation. For nearly two hundred years,
have we your TRIPU did this immensely famous poem to
the wrong person? My colleague bend Adaf Haffrey has a story. Oh,
one last thing. If you're listening with young children familiar
(04:25):
with Santa Claus, this episode might challenge their sense of reality,
Proceed with caution.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Sometime in the late nineteen nineties, a woman named Mary
van Dusen logged onto the Internet. She was looking up
her great great great great great grandfather, Major Henry Livingston junior.
That's right, seven generations back, and while browsing the World
Wide Web, she came across a piece of information that
changed the course of her life.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
One of the pages that came up was just a
very short little page, but it said two things. It
said that Henry Livingston was a possible author of Night
before Christmas, and it said that he had named his
reindeer for the horses in his stable. Who would believe it?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Henry Livingston Junior was a gentleman farmer and poet from
a prominent early American family. He was reputed to be
a great lover of Christmas, and, crucially for our purposes today,
not Clement Clark Moore, the person who had claimed authorship
of the poem not long after its publication, and who
for almost two centuries the general public has believed wrote it.
(05:37):
So to Marry and others in her family, it seemed
he was also the victim of a historic injustice. Just
a couple decades after a visit from Saint Nicholas, the
poem was published, his granddaughter came across a best selling
holiday edition and saw the author's name clearly printed, Clement
Clark Moore, at which point she brought it in a
(05:58):
hurry to her mother, Henry's daughter in law, who said,
someone has made a mistake. Clement Moore did not write
the night before Christmas. Your grandfather, Henry Livingston wrote it.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
They saw a wrong that needed to be writed.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
So then you start looking at this right now. Henry
had never claimed authorship himself, but he died in eighteen
twenty eight, so no one could ask him about it.
But the family remembered it as Henry's poem, and they
took it upon themselves to do the research to prove
it to the world, and so began the Great Livingston Quest.
(06:32):
This is Montague's and Cabulot's Hatfield and McCoy's Christmas Edition.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
The first person took it up were the children of Catherine,
my fourth grade grandmother, so I was always pleased about that.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
At the beginning, all the family had was recollection relatives
who said that Henry Livingston Junior had read the poem
aloud to them when they were kids, but they needed
to establish a record. The gold standard would be a
copy of the poem written in Henry's hand.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
Decided they would collect as many pieces of paper as
they could, and this is really a godsend because they
were able to contact two of Henry's children before they died.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
They heard that someone had gotten a copy of the
poem that had Henry's handwriting on it, and do we
have it today or no.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
We don't because they're living on the frontier and the
original burned in one of the house fires.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
But the livingstones didn't quit. When we talked, Mary walked
me through the generations of people who've taken up the quest.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Since The next search for proof of Henry's authorship is
from Henry Livingstone, a babylon Long Island.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I began to understand that this search was a kind
of Livingstonian rite of passage, something handed from generation to
generation like a precious gemstone, or like a feudal title,
a matter of destiny.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Having your name in your birth announcement as having to
research night before Christmas puts burden on your shoulders that
is very heavy.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
After all, this is an eminent family. The genealogical tree
Mary has put together includes George H. W. Bush W
and Jeb as well as a congressman and a mayor
of New York. Eleanor Roosevelt was also in the mix somehow.
But alongside the campaigns and inaugurations, there is a single
golden thread, the authorship question. And I think part of
(08:41):
that fixation must have had to do with what poetry
meant at the time. Malcolm and I talked about that
over a glass of agnog at the annual Revision's History
Holiday party.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
One of the things that interests me it is a
poem created in a very specific moment in time, the
early nineteenth century, and because poetry plays a role in
public life in back then in a way that it
doesn't know.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Right, Well, some newspapers are the mass the mass medium, right,
there's not television, radio, recorded sound doesn't exist. So you
have poems all over the place in newspapers and they
are there.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
They are off, they.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Can be satirical, they can be funny. They're these very concise,
pithy ways of expressing popular sentiments. And the ones that
are really gonna give you a good example, yeah, please.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
My mom grew up in Jamaica during the Second World War,
has all these hilarious poems written about the Second World
War from a Jamaican perspective. My favorite this one might
be an it might be an English one. You know,
there are all these Americans come over in our station
in England before the D Day. So she would as
a kid, my mom would recite this one, the gum
(09:53):
chewing ink and the cut chewing cow, very alike. The
difference somehow, what is the difference? I've got it now,
the intelligent look on the face of the cow. But
it's to the point, right right that a lot of
these what but the users trying to navigate is the
indignity of this huge country of what people they consider
(10:16):
to be their inferiors, uncultured coming and saving their bacon. Right,
it's humiliating, and how do they make sense of that humiliation?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
To these poems?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Poems are doing all this.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Work very much like I'm almost like a meme today
where it's like you see a thing and you're like,
that gets it, that somehow ineffably puts its finger right
on the pulse. Yeah, And the pulse this poem had
its finger on was that there was a crisis of Christmas.
At the very moment of its publication.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
Before the visit trend from Saint Nick, Christmas was celebrated
in a very different way.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize, shortlisted the Battle
for Christmas in his book. He argues that Christmas was
always about these social inversions. So lower class people would
live like kings for the best food, the best ale presents,
provided they were peasants from then on. But those traditions
were better suited to grand old country estates where everyone
(11:19):
knew each other and kind of accepted where they fit
in the pecking order. That was not the case in
modern American democratic cities.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something
of a cross between Halloween and New Year's Eve because
of what amount to trick or treat. Bands of young men,
most of them pour from the working classes, went roving
around town. They'd stop at the more prosperous homes where
(11:51):
they'd ask for food and alcohol. But if they didn't
get what they wanted, they would ostentatiously withhold that goodwill,
or they might even threaten to do some small damage.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Christmas was getting out of control, and so a group
of elite New Yorkers took the matter in hand.
Speaker 5 (12:12):
We're talking about a small group of people who call
themselves Knickerbackers, after the Dutch origins of the city. But
this was a kind of identity that they tried on
to create again a sense of the good old days
of New York when the classes did get along and
the meshing worked very well.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
The Knickerbockers were a conservative organization trying to invent new
American traditions and also great names for basketball teams go NIXX,
and they found a figurehead for their new version of
Christmas in Saint Nicholas of Myra, patron Saint of merchants, bakers, brides,
the falsely accused.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
And children.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
In the eighteen twenties, the lines between Saint Nicholas and
the sort of scary figure of Santa Claus, a mythological
gift giver, began to blur. But how were the Knickerbockers
going to unleash this new invention upon the huddled masses.
The answer came in eighteen twenty three with the poem
we've been talking about in this episode, five hundred and
(13:12):
forty two words about a guy named Saint Nicholas terrifying
a well to do father by showing up in the
middle of the night and instead of demanding the best
grog in the house, leaving a bunch of presents, exactly
the kind of poem Clement Clark Moore, an eminent New
Yorker and friend of the Knickerbockers, would write at precisely
that moment. Moore was a Bible scholar. He lived on
(13:33):
an estate in Manhattan called Chelsea, which later did in
fact become the neighborhood of Chelsea.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
The New Christmas that Clement Clark Moore was promulgating continued,
in a very innocent way, the old social inversion, but
in this case it wasn't the rich changing places with
the poor. It was the grown ups changing places with
the kids. So the children have really replaced the working
(14:03):
class in the new Christmas.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
This was a version of Christmas that worked, and it
just got bigger. Clement Moore's estate shrank, but his legend
and the legend of his poem grew until the Livingstons
caught wind of it. The problem was that, despite all
their efforts, no Livingstone had been able to turn up
any conclusive, historical or documentary evidence proving beyond a reasonable
(14:28):
doubt that Henry Livingston Junior had written the poem. But
what if there was another approach? An ancestor of Mary
van Dusen's hit upon this idea in a letter from
the nineteen twenties. She had been interviewed for an article
in the Christian Science Monitor on the authorship question, one
of the first times this claim that Henry Livingston Junior
(14:49):
had written the poem went national. This, it turned out,
was kind of a jarring experience for her, so she
wrote to her cousin William, who'd set the whole thing up.
Speaker 5 (14:59):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I am writing from my bed. I could not sleep
last night, and thinking over our conversation, I got drawn
into this cross examination, which was quite inquisitorial in its nature.
For the problematical authorship of that poem. It is a
very delicate question to handle, and I am not at
all in favor of a writer for a Christian science
paper handling it. It ought to be touched on, very delicately,
(15:22):
and by some man of eminent literary attainments. Wait till
you find the fit man to do it. We relatives
would only have dirt thrown at us by press and people,
for see Moore is a demigod almost in their eyes.
Almost a century has this fetish been adored. And I
will not have myself or my family mixed up in it.
(15:42):
It is too delicate a subject to be dragged and
raked about except with great tact and reverence. Wait till
you get someone of high literary merit to write about
the authorship. Do not make this any but a first
class writer. End quote. Without documentary proof, the Livingstones needed
to make a stylistic argument that this poem sounded like
(16:04):
Livingstin and not like more and only someone of literary
attainments could really land it. The Living Stones would wait
nearly eighty years until Mary van Dusen came across that website,
took up the family quest and found such a scholar.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
At last, I figured I needed a poetry expert, so
I went to the internet and I looked at a
archive poetry. I saw Ian Lancashire as the expert of
the website and sent to email and I said, I
have this problem.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
What do I do?
Speaker 4 (16:45):
And he said, you find Don.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
When we're back. Don the man ab eminent literary attainments
and the very best thing the Livingstons could ever hope
to find in their stockings. It's the week before Thanksgiving,
(17:18):
the year two thousand. A group of people file into
a bookstore in Washington, d C. To have their very
sense of reality challenged. The event aired on c SPAN.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Thanks is great to be with you this evening.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
This is Don Foster. At the time, he was an
English professor at Vassar. He's straight out of Central Casting
Laser khakis, tie handsome in a dead poet's Society kind
of way. When he makes a particularly devilish point, he
shrugs his shoulders almost imperceptibly as his eyes wander to
the corner of his great big glasses, as if to say,
(17:53):
do I dare to eat a peach. Do I dare
disturb the universe?
Speaker 5 (17:58):
I do.
Speaker 6 (17:59):
My office is what you would expect in English professor's
office to be piled high with student papers and with
writings I have studied by poets and play rights. I'm
still unknown, but intermixed with the literary text are others
by Felon Zealotz or Nameless resent Nix, whose identity your
actions were of sufficient interest for someone to ask who
(18:21):
wrote this thing?
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Professor Foster made his name arguing that an anonymously published
poem called a Funeral Elegy was actually written by William Shakespeare.
He'd used modern computer analysis to argue it so forcefully
that anthologies were updated and the press took note. Foster's
phone began to.
Speaker 6 (18:42):
Ring, Professor, do you know that you're going to be
on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?
And I said, well, Professor, a star was born.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Foster practiced a kind of forensics called literary attribution. The
premise was that each of us has a style, a
kind of fingerprint in the way we write that, if revealed,
would prove conclusively that we wrote something. Dusting for that
fingerprint relied on two key methodologies. First, computer analysis, where
statistic patterns could be detected in an author's work, kind
(19:12):
of like large language models. Now a second, an investigator
would marshal their own powers of close reading. For instance,
just weeks after the Shakespeare story blew Up, Foster was
asked to identify the anonymous author of a dish novel
called Primary Colors, a thinly veiled account of the Clinton campaign.
Foster had a list of suspects. He fed samples of
(19:34):
their writing into his computer and began to look closely
at how the book was written. The anonymous writer showed
a preference for adverbs with l y endings like vaguely.
He used dashes to make compound words like triple back
over somersault and pander pirouette.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
He liked zany adjectives.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
His pros thought Foster revealed certain racial ideas, and all
those signs pointed clearly to the journalist Joe Klein. Foster
nailed it. Klin eventually fessed up, and this was when
things started to get weird for the professor.
Speaker 6 (20:09):
And at that point prosecutors and defenders and police and
other investigators saw in my work application that I had
not really thought of myself questioned. Documents in criminal cases
and other kinds of anonymous libels Harris mensa were suddenly
being sent to me and saying, can you figure out
(20:30):
who wrote this?
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Soon Foster was teaching my day and by night working
the Unibomber case, the John Benet Ramsay case, the Anthrax case,
and few major news items of the late nineteen nineties
were beyond the literary forensics.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
Single was Don Foster a report at Monica Lewinsky wrote
the three page document.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So I now go back and ask the question, did
she really?
Speaker 3 (20:53):
The crowd in the bookstore is wrapped around his finger,
and that's when he starts talking about Mary van Dusen,
the great great great great great granddaughter of Major Henry
Livingston junior.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
I got a phone call in August of nineteen I
twenty nine from a woman who said that she thought
that her ancestor wrote The Night before Christmas, not Clement
Clark Moore.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Mary and Don teamed up. She traveled the country searching
for proof every version of the Night before Christmas that
was ever written. She made a corpus of Henry's work.
She got a microfilm machine for her house for her
house and read every single newspaper she could find from
seventeen seventy five to eighteen thirty. In order to establish
a documentary record, she put it all on a website,
(21:39):
which ran ultimately to over fifteen thousand pages by her account,
in hopes that Don could do his detective work and
find an answer, and he did. He began to look
into questions of style, just like he did with primary colors.
What sort of adjectives were used, what kind of adverbs,
what sort of attitudes were expressed? He compared a visit
(22:01):
from Saint Nicholas to other poems by Moore and Livingstone.
Hundreds of thousands of words had been written on this subject,
and we all have all lace to get to. So
I'm going to be selective about what we talk about here.
But a good example of the case he made is
the question of anapestic to trameter, an extremely tedious matter that,
(22:22):
of course, is the only thing Malcolm wanted to talk
about when I saw him.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I want to be in the graduate seminar with you
where this poem is taking seriously.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Okay, let's let's let's uh, let's break down the formal
qualities of this poem. First, there's the meter, which is
sort of the crucial thing here. This poem is in
a extremely popular meter used for light versus satire called
anipestic to trameter.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
So give it rhythmically, give me lines at show.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Twas the night before Christmas went all through the house,
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Da
da dum da da dumba so.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Dumbda d d.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Dump.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And you, as a parent might be familiar with this
from like all of Doctor SEUs, So like Horton, here's
a who on the fifteenth of May and the jungle
of newle and the heat of the day and the
cool of the pool he was splashing, and you know
this kind of like it trips off the tongue. An
anipest is aligne. It's two unstressed syllables and a stressed one.
So it's dadda dumb, dadda dumb. That's like a dadda dumb.
(23:18):
That's an anipest to trameter tetra from the Latin for four.
It means there's four of those per line of an
anipestic to trameter. It's such an infectious meter. It's easier
to memorize and so it can transmit through word of
mouth much more easily, which is what happens with this
this poem as well. In fact, it is it's it's
so good for the spoken word that the way many
(23:39):
people probably know it today other than to was the
night before Christmas is the way I am by eminem
was the night before Christmas, and all through the house
it's like it's it just like it hooks you in.
(24:03):
So Foster alleged that More was way too serious to
be a big anipestic to Trameter. He says that Moore
condemned the quote depraved taste in poetry of those who
read anipestic satire end quote. In essence, Livingstone was way
more likely to write an anipest than More, not least
of all because he was just a really fun guy.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
Here's a little sample of Henry Livingston's verse. This is
why he closes one of his many Christmas and New
Year's poems, but his time that I bid you goodbye
till next year by wishing you happiness, peace and good cheer.
And he has the kind of poem after poem after
poem in this vein many of them Christmas or New
Year's poems.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Then he turns his attention to Clement Clark Moore.
Speaker 6 (24:45):
Clement Clark Moore I thought was pretty Santa Claus kind
of guy too, But as it turns out, this is
part of the lore that's arisen after his name was
associated with the poem.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
It was quite the curmudgeon.
Speaker 6 (24:55):
One might even say scrooge, I might even say grinch.
He writes things like humble the praise and trifling the regard,
whichever way upon the moral barred. And then he goes
on to scold women for wearing cosmetics or to unchastised
children for being too noisy.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Quite a severe man.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
So, according to Foster, on the one hand, we have
a good cheer to the ladies kind of guy, and
then there's the grinch scrooge. You could say maybe Moore
didn't stand a chance just based on this character assassination.
But there was more. In his book, Foster compared the
two men further. Henry Livingston Junior fought for independence, Clement
(25:34):
Moore was allegedly a slave owner. Livingston was a quote
friend of the Indians. Moore descended from the guy who
talked the Mohawks into selling Long Island and stylistically even
setting aside the slam dunk of the anapestic tetramoner, the
poem is Livingston all over the use of the adverbial
all as in the children were nestled, all snug in
their beds, and then some funny business with the reindeer names.
(25:57):
It all looked very, very suspicious. Don Foster, the man
of eminent literary attainments, had apparently solved the mystery. At
law last, the press went wild.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
Finally tonight, the mystery of a visit from Saint Nicholas.
It has been a holiday tradition since eighteen twenty two.
But who really wrote the famous poem?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
He was in the New York Times twice. He was
on network television.
Speaker 7 (26:27):
Don Foster is sort of a literary sleuth. He was
the one who discovered journalist Joe Klein was the anonymous
author of the bestseller Primary Colors. He studies the author's
words and styles, and in this case he says, Henry
Livingston's literary fingerprints are all over. The night before Christmas.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Don Foster's argument spread The city of Troy, whose newspaper
famously first published the poem, hosted as a kind of
Christmas media event, a mock trial in a real courtroom,
presided over by a former New York Supreme Court judge
and argued by actual lawyers on the question of who
wrote the poem. As the Jerry reached a verdict, Jerry
and Edgeley decided that the author was Ane for Christmas Is.
(27:21):
This prompted the Mayor of Troy to issue a proclamation
quote that December twenty third, twenty fourteen is Henry Livingston
Junior Day and Troy, New York. Famous musicians have reportedly
announced on stage that Henry Livingston Junior is the real
author of the poem. The Freaking Poetry Foundation website has
a page for Henry Livingston Junior, crediting him as the
(27:42):
author of the poem. Unambiguously. This is not ubiquitous, but
through Don Foster, Mary van Duzen, and the Livingstons had
achieved something her ancestors could only ever have dreamed of.
And even if people stopped short of denying Moore's authorship everywhere,
people began to question it. After nearly two centuries of injustice,
(28:05):
the Livingston family quest was paying.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
Off to myself come around to the view and that
this whole family legend was right in fact has I
think finally been vindicated, and Bible professors claimed to this poem,
I think is not just highly suspect, but waiting to
see what the opposition might have to say.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Oh but the opposition was watching, and they didn't like
what they saw. A couple of months ago, I visited
Seth Kaller, a famed dealer of historic documents in White Plains,
(28:52):
New York. Statues of Abraham Lincoln were strewn about the office.
Advanced copies of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
An original Prince of the Constitution hung on the wall
the Constitution I Have a Dream twas the night before Christmas.
Speaker 8 (29:09):
At the time the controversy erupted because of Don Foster's book,
I owned what was thought to be the only copy
in private hands, written by Clemency Moore.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Caller became embroiled in the authorship.
Speaker 8 (29:23):
Question, and so a New York Times reporter called me
and asked me about it, And you know, I said,
I didn't know, let me look into it. And I
was totally open minded. I mean, if I had been convinced,
I would have changed my description of it and or
mentioned the controversy. But the more I got into it,
you know, the more upset I got by the dishonesty
(29:48):
of the arguments made against Clement Moore. So I kept
going even after I thought this is sufficient to you know,
make the case.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
You did send me quite a long document in preparation
for this conversation.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, and I could have sent you a lot more.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Caller began to go through the claims in Don Foster's book,
and he soon found that most of them, We're deeply suspicious.
The comparable phraseology that table confused me. Would you? Would
you explain the origin of that table?
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Let me find it?
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Caller got out of binder stuffed with papers. Nobody is
taking this matter lightly. In fact, we spent an entire
afternoon going through this. Let's stick to the big ticket
items today first style. More wouldn't write like this, but
Caller showed me a chart comparing parts of the poem
with other poems More had written.
Speaker 8 (30:39):
Here's another from another one of his writings, Twas an
autumnal morn, celestial bright, the all Snug and from something else.
In The Snug and Tidy Night before Christmas, he talks
about visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
One of the rhymes in Night.
Speaker 8 (30:56):
Before Christmas is a clatter and matter, and in another
poem is.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Words, feelings, thought phrases.
Speaker 8 (31:04):
These would all be evidence that More could have written
the Night Before Christmas, and in fact did write the
Night Before Christmas, as opposed to you know, just making
the arguments that he couldn't have because he didn't use
these for these words.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
So maybe Livingston as author can't be proven stylistically, But
that's not all he and his colleagues found. The historical
argument about when Henry would have needed to write the
poem in order to be the author didn't line.
Speaker 8 (31:31):
Up either, But the fact that all of the stories
that the Livingston family have told can be actually disproven.
You know, oh, was taken by a nanny, and then
you prove that, well, then nanny wasn't there for another
eight years.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Also suspect Foster's finding that Moore was a humorless scrooge,
which was often a clear case of taking something More
had written out of context.
Speaker 8 (31:55):
What I found wasn't just that it was misinterpreted, but
that it was elited to the point where if you
just read the full sentence, it actually proves the opposite
of what is being used to.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Argue Now.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I can't know the mind of Don Foster, but there
were at least a few examples of his attributions not
exactly panning out. A couple of years after his book
Author Unknown came out, he retracted his famous claim that
Shakespeare had written the Funeralogy, under mounting skepticism, and after
he wrote an article seeming to suggest an innocent government
(32:35):
scientist was responsible for sending the anthrax letters after September eleventh,
he was sued for libel, settled for some undisclosed amount
of money, and went back to being predominantly a vasser
English professor. I had hoped to interview him for this story,
but he declined to speak with me through a colleague.
He'll keep Christmas in his way, and I'll keep it
(32:55):
in mind. But in my view, Foster's argument has done
a grave injustice to Clement Clark Moore that we, the
staff of Revisionist History and associates in the Rare Documents trade,
refused to leave unchallenged.
Speaker 8 (33:08):
And his book Arthur Unknown is still referred to and
still used by, you know, people who are looking into it.
And then so many other reporters go with it as
the story if he said she said that. I don't
blame the family as much as I blame some of
the scholars who should know better.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
But it does still bother.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
Me, Like if I bring up or the last time
I did was years ago, bring up the idea of
a museum exhibit and Clement Moore's authorship. Some accept it outright,
but others have been, well, we have to be careful,
we have to talk about the controversy. No, you know,
you have to acknowledge that there was one, but you
should not pretend that it's actually real.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Christmas is all about your dreams coming true. Maybe Foster
tried to do that for Mary, But to my mind,
in the end, I think what they set in motion
was a satisfying and to the mystery, it just wasn't
the conclusion they'd hoped for.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
It's fine with me that you come to a different
position than I do. I don't ever say flatly that
Henry wrote the poem. I say, I believe that Henry
wrote the poem, and here's the data, and make up
your own mind. So if you use it to come
(34:33):
to a different conclusion than I do, that's fine. At
least you examine the issue and you feel peace in
yourself at the answer you come to.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Then, was there was there one bit of evidence set
for you really sealed the case.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Yeah. This whole argument against Clenen Clark Moore relies on
the idea that he's a scrooge who would never write
about Christmas. He would never never write light verse, never
write about fairies, certainly never write about Santa Claus and Christmas.
And these researchers found not just one, but two effectively
(35:19):
Christmas poems by Clement Clark Moore that pre date or
are in tight sequence with a Visit from Saint Nicholas.
So the first is a letter called from Saint Nicholas,
which is literally in the voice of Santa Claus to
Clemic Clark Moore's kid, which I guess, true to his haters,
is about why she's not getting any presents that year,
though it is very sweet and crucially it's an anithestic determiner.
(35:43):
But this one is the one that I actually really love.
The Melville scholar Scott Norsworthy thinks that this poem and
a Visit from Saint Nicholas were written at the same time.
There was a snowstorm in New York on December twenty first.
Was a Saturday in eighteen twenty two, Throughoute this poem
(36:05):
called lines, written after a snowstorm.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
I'll read it to you.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Come, children, dear, and look around. Behold how soft and
light the silent snow has clad the ground in robes
of purest white. The trees seem decked by fairy hand
nor knead their native green, and every breeze appears to
stand all hushed to view the seam. You wonder how
the snows are made that dance upon the air, as
if from purer worlds they strayed so lightly and so fair.
(36:35):
Perhaps they are the summer flowers in northern stars, that
bloom wafted away from icy bowers to cheer our winter's gloom.
Perhaps they are feathers of a race of birds that
live away in some cold, dreary, wintry place, far from
the sun's warm ray and clouds. Perhaps are downy beds
on which the winds repose, who, when they rouse their
(36:56):
slumbering heads, shake down the feathery snows. But see, my darlings,
while we stay and gaze with fond delight the fairy scene.
Soon fades away and mocks our raptured sight, and let
this fleet eating vision teach truth. You soon must know
that all the joys we here can reach are transient
as the snow.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
They say something.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Christmas is a made up holiday. The core of it
is these weird social inversions that last for a day
and then melt like the new fallen snow. In that sense,
I think it's easy to see why the story that
Henry Livingston Junior actually wrote this poem gets retold so often.
It's another Christmas ee inversion, one about as old as
(37:42):
modern Christmas itself, just another story about a thing that's
not as it seems. Fat men in velvet robes sliding
down thin chimneys, everything you ever wanted under a tree
that's indoors, and your great great great great great grandfathers
forgotten roll in inventing Christmas. I don't believe it, but
(38:06):
then again tis the season. Revisionist History is produced by
me Bennatt of Haffrey, with Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan.
Our editor is Karen Schakergie fact checking by Onica Robbins.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke
(38:30):
Lehmand engineering by David Herman at Good Studios and Nina
Bird Lawrence. Original music was composed, arranged, and recorded by
Luis Gara, mixing and mastering bar Marcelo di Olivera. I
have stood on the shoulders of giants for this absurd episode.
All credit to the scholars and writers who made this possible,
(38:50):
Scott Norsworthy of the Melvileana Blog, Tom Jerman, and Justin Fox.
To our friends in Troy, the incomparable Duncan Crairie and
city historian Kathy Shehan. If I've left you unconvinced about
Moore's authorship, you can read the latest salvo from the
Livingstonians in the book Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas
by Professor MacDonald P.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Jackson.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Just be sure to read Scott Norseworthy's response to it
on the Melvilliana Blog right afterwards. From Revisionist History, Happy
holidays and we'll see you all in the new year.
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