Twas the Night Before Christmas

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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.

• 0:28Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 1:09Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 1:54Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 2:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  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, Ben the Daff Hafry, shows up to tell me some absolutely crazy story about Christmas.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  'Twas the night before Christmas.

• 3:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  And all through the house, not a creature was stirring.

• 3:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  Not even a mouse.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  This, of course, is a visit from St. 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.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Have you read the Stuart Little version of this, where to save Stuart's feelings, the Little's rewrite it as "not even a louse"? Because they wanted this too demeaning to mice. This poem's everywhere. It's in Stuart Little, it's in Die Hard. Presidents, read this poem.

• 3:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Keep going.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  "The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugarplums danced in their heads. My ma and her kerchief and I and my cap had just settled our brains," very weird choice of words there, "for a long winter's nap."

• 4:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  This went on for a while.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  "I knew in a moment it must be Saint Nick."

• 4:15Speaker 02

  So, this is the poem that creates, it fully launches the modern Santa Claus. It's the first time the reindeer's are named. It's the first time he gets eight and not one.

• 4:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  And it is the blueprint for American Christmas. Everyone thinks Christmas is this ancient thing. There's no evidence that Jesus Christ was born on December 25th. The whole thing is this invented tradition. And it is this poem that gives us the modern American Christmas, written by Clement Clarke Moore in 1822, published in upstate New York in the Troy Sentinel in 1823.

• 4:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 get-

• 5:03Speaker 02

  So we've established this in prior versions of our Christmas episodes.

• 5:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  But 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.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  I would stake my life on the fact that more people, this is the only poem that most people know.

• 5:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Totally agree. Totally. And I was gonna say that that an incredibly high percentage of people of America not only know this poem from memory, but know no other poems at this length from memory.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 5:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  It starts by acknowledging that they don't know who wrote it.

• 5:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. So it begins, it begins with an authorship mystery.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  And the authorship mystery persists.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Yes. So I propose to end it here today.

• 6:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 6:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 6:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  Today, we bring you our annual holiday spectacular, which this year is not about sugarplums, but about a historic theft, a literary crime that begins with a bold accusation. For nearly 200 years, have we attributed this immensely famous poem to the wrong person? My colleague Ben Didaf-Hafré has the story.

• 6:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, one last thing. If you're listening with young children familiar with Santa Claus, this episode might challenge their sense of reality. Proceed with caution.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Sometime in the late 1990s, a woman named Mary Van Duzen logged onto the internet. She was looking up her great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Major Henry Livingston, Jr. 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.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  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?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Henry Livingston, Jr. 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 Clarke 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. So to Mary and others in her family, it seemed he was also the victim of a historic injustice. Just a couple decades after a visit from St. Nicholas, the poem was published, his granddaughter came across a bestselling holiday edition and saw the author's name clearly printed, Clement Clarke Moore. At which point, she brought it in a hurry to her mother, Henry's daughter-in-law, who

• 8:27Speaker 02

  said, "Someone has made a mistake. Clement Moore did not write The Night Before Christmas? Your grandfather, Henry Livingston, wrote it."

• 8:35Speaker 03

  They saw a wrong that needed to be righted.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  So then you start looking into this.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Now, Henry had never claimed authorship himself, but he died in 1828, 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. This is Montagues and Capulets, Hatfields and McCoys, Christmas Edition.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  The first person that took it up were the children of Catherine, my fourth great-grandmother, so I was always pleased about that.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  At the beginning, all the family had was recollection. Relatives who said that Henry Livingston Jr. 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.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  They 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.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  They heard that someone had gotten a copy of the poem that had Henry's handwriting on it. And do we have that today? Or?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  No, we don't because they're living on the frontier. And the original burned in one of the house fires.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  But the Livingstons didn't quit. When we talked, Mary walked me through the generations of people who've taken up the quest since.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  The next search for proof of Henry's authorship is from Henry Livingston of Babylon, Long Island.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  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 futile title, a matter of destiny.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Having your name in your birth announcement as having to research night before Christmas puts a burden on your shoulders that is very heavy.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  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 was a single golden thread, the authorship question. And I think part of that fixation must have had to do with what poetry meant at the time. Malcolm and I talked about that over a glass of eggnog at the annual Revisionist History Holiday Party.

• 11:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the things that interests me, it is a poem created in a very specific moment in time, the early 19th century.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  And because poetry plays a role in public life back then in a way that it doesn't now.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Right, well, newspapers are the mass, the mass media, right? There's not television, radio, recorded sound doesn't exist. So you have poems all over the place in newspapers and they are, they're, they are off, they can be satirical, they can be funny, they're these very concise, pithy ways of expressing popular sentiments. And the ones that are really-

• 11:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Can I give you a good example?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, please.

• 11:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 English, might be an English one. You know, there are all these Americans come over and are stationed in England before the, before D-Day. So she would, as a kid, my mom would recite this one. "The gum-chewing yank and the cud-chewing cow, very alike, but different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I've got it now. The intelligent look on the face of the cow."

• 12:30Speaker 02

  That's so good.

• 12:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  But no, it's to the point, right?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  That a lot of these, what the English are trying to navigate is the indignity of this huge country of what people they consider to be their inferiors, uncultured-

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  Coming and saving their bacon, right? It's humiliating. And how do they make sense of that humiliation through these poems? Poems are doing all this work.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Very much like, 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.

• 13:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And the pulse this poem had its finger on was that there was a crisis of Christmas at the very moment of its publication.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  Before the visit trends from Saint Nick, Christmas was celebrated in a very different way.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  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 a day, 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 knew each other and kind of accepted where they fit in the pecking order. That was not the case in modern American democratic cities.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something of a cross between Halloween and New Year's Eve because of what amounts to trick or treat. Bands of young men, most of them poor from the working classes, went roving around town. They'd stop at the more prosperous homes where 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.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Christmas was getting out of control. And so, a group of elite New Yorkers took the matter in hand.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  We're talking about a small group of people who called themselves Knickerbockers 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.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  The Knickerbockers were a conservative organization trying to invent new American traditions and also great names for basketball teams. Go Knicks! 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, and children. In the 1820s, 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 1823 with the poem we've been talking about in this episode. 542 words about a guy named St. Nicholas terrifying a well-to-do father by showing up in the middle of the night

• 15:45Speaker 02

  and instead of demanding the best grog in the house, leaving a bunch of presents. Exactly the kind of poem Clement Clarke Moore, an eminent New Yorker and friend of the Knickerbockers, would write at precisely that moment. Moore was a Bible scholar. He lived on an estate in Manhattan called Chelsea, which later did in fact become the neighborhood of Chelsea.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  The new Christmas that Clement Clarke 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 grownups changing places with the kids. So the children have really replaced the working class in the new Christmas.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  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 Livingston had been able to turn up any conclusive historical or documentary evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Henry Livingston Jr. 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 1920s. She'd been interviewed for an article in the Christian Science Monitor on the authorship question, one of the first times this claim that Henry Livingston Jr. had written the poem went national.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  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. Quote, "I am writing from my bed. I could not sleep last night in 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, 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 Seymour is a demigod almost in their eyes.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Almost a century has this fetish been adored, and I will not have myself or my family mixed up in it. 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 Livingstons needed to make a stylistic argument that this poem sounded like Livingston and not like Moore. And only someone of eminent literary attainments could really land it. The Livingstons would wait nearly 80 years, until Mary Van Dusen came across that website,

• 18:47Speaker 02

  took up the Family Quest, and found such a scholar at last.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  I figured I needed a poetry expert. So I went to the internet, and I looked at a archived poetry. I saw Ian Lancashire as the expert of the website, and sent him an email. And I said, "I have this problem. What do I do?" And he said, "You find Don."

• 19:15Speaker 02

  When we're back, Don, the man of eminent literary attainments, and the very best thing the Livingstons could ever hope to find in their stockings.

• 19:41Speaker 00

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• 20:18Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 21:01Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 21:45Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 23:58Speaker 02

  It's the week before Thanksgiving, the year 2000. A group of people file into a bookstore in Washington DC to have their very sense of reality challenged. The event aired on C-SPAN.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  Thanks, it's great to be with you this evening.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  This is Don Foster. At the time, he was an English professor at Vassar. He's straight out of Central Casting: blazer, 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, "Do I dare to eat a peach? Do I dare disturb the universe? I do."

• 24:41Speaker 06

  My office is what you would expect an English professor's office to be: piled high with student papers and with writings I have studied by poets and playwrights, some still unknown. But intermixed with literary texts are others by felon zealots or nameless resentiks, whose identity or actions were of sufficient interest for someone to ask, "Who wrote this thing?"

• 25:05Speaker 02

  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 ring.

• 25:24Speaker 06

  "Professor, do you know that you're going to be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?" And I said, "Well, no, Professor, do you..."

• 25:29Speaker 02

  A star was born. 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 statistical patterns could be detected in an author's work, kind 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 dishy novel called "Primary Colors," a thinly veiled account of the Clinton campaign.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Foster had a list of suspects. He fed samples of 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 -ly endings, like vaguely. He used dashes to make compound words like "triple back over somersault and pander pirouette." He liked zany adjectives. His prose, thought Foster, revealed certain racial ideas. And all those signs pointed clearly to the journalist, Joe Klein. Foster nailed it. Klein eventually fessed up. And this was when things started to get weird for the professor.

• 26:51Speaker 06

  And at that point, prosecutors and defenders and police and other investigators saw in my work an application that I had not really thought of myself. Questioned documents in criminal cases and other kinds of anonymous libel's harassments were suddenly being sent to me and saying, can you figure out who wrote this?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Soon Foster was teaching by day and by night, working the Unabomber case, the JonBenet Ramsey case, the Anthrax case, and few major news items of the late 1990s were beyond the literary forensics of Don Foster.

• 27:28Speaker 06

  That Monica Lewinsky wrote the three-page document. So I now go back and ask the question, did she really?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  The crowd in the bookstore is wrapped around his finger. And that's when he starts talking about Mary Van Duzen, the great, great, great, great, great granddaughter of Major Henry Livingston Jr.

• 27:48Speaker 06

  I got a phone call in August of 1999 from a woman who said that she thought that her ancestor wrote The Night Before Christmas, not Clement Clarke Moore.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  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 1775 to 1830 in order to establish a documentary record. She put it all on a website, which ran ultimately to over 15,000 pages by her count, 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?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  He compared A Visit from St. Nicholas to other poems by Moore and Livingston. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written on this subject, and we all have holidays 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 tetrameter. An extremely tedious matter, that of course, is the only thing Malcolm wanted to talk about when I saw him.

• 29:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to be in the graduate seminar with you where this poem is taken seriously.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Okay, let's, let's, uh, let's break down the, 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 verse and satire called anapestic tetrameter. So-

• 29:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  So rhythmically, give me lines that show-

• 29:31Speaker 02

  'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Da-da-dum, da-da-dum.

• 29:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  And you, as a parent, might be familiar with this from like all of Dr. Seuss. So like Horton, Here's a Who, On the Fifteenth of May, in the jungle of Newell, in the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, he was splashing. And you know, this kind of like, it trips off the tongue. An anapest is a line, it's two unstressed syllables and a stressed one. So it's da-da-dum, da-da-dum. That's like a da-da-dum, that's an anapest. Tetrameter, tetra from the Latin for four, it means there's four of those per line of an anapestic tetrameter. 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. And in fact, it is, it's, it's so good for the spoken word that the way many people probably know it,

• 30:23Speaker 02

  today, other than 'twas the night before Christmas, is The Way I Am by Eminem.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum. 'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house. You see, it's like, it's, it, it just like, it hooks you in. Yeah. So Foster alleged that Moore was way too serious to be a big anapistic tetrameter guy. He says that Moore condemned the quote "depraved taste in poetry of those who read anapistic satire," end quote. In essence, Livingston was way more likely to write an anapest than Moore, not least of all because he was just a really fun guy.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  Here's a little sample of Henry Livingston's verse. This is where he closes one of his many Christmas and New Year's poems. "But tis time that I bid you good-bye till next year by wishing you happiness, peace, and good cheer." And he has kind of poem after poem after poem in this vein, many of them Christmas or New Year's poems.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Then he turns his attention to Clement Clark Moore.

• 31:27Speaker 06

  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. It was quite the curmudgeon, one might even say Scrooge, or might even say Grinch. He writes things like "humble the praise and trifling the regard, whichever wait upon the moral bard." And then he goes on to scold women for wearing cosmetics, or chastise children for being too noisy. Quite a severe man.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  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 Moore. In his book, Foster compared the two men further. Henry Livingston Jr. fought for independence. Clement 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 anapistic tetrameter, the poem has 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.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  It all looked very, very suspicious. Don Foster, the man of eminent literary attainments, had apparently solved the mystery at long last. The press went wild.

• 32:55Speaker 07

  Finally tonight, the mystery of a visit from Saint Nicholas. It has been a holiday tradition since 1822, but who really wrote the famous poem?

• 33:04Speaker 02

  He was in The New York Times twice. He was on network television.

• 33:08Speaker 08

  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.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:46Speaker 09

  Has the jury reached a verdict? The jury unanimously decided that the author of The Night Before Christmas is Henry Livingston Jr.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  This prompted the mayor of Troy to issue a proclamation, quote, "That December 23rd, 2014 is Henry Livingston Jr. Day in Troy, New York." Famous musicians have reportedly announced onstage that Henry Livingston Jr. is the real author of the poem. The freaking Poetry Foundation website has a page for Henry Livingston Jr. crediting him as the author of the poem unambiguously. This is not ubiquitous, but through Don Foster, Mary Van Dusen 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.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  After nearly two centuries of injustice, the Livingston family quest was paying off.

• 34:50Speaker 06

  I had myself come around to the view and that this old family legend was right. In fact, has, I think, finally been vindicated. And Bible professors' claim to this poem, I think, is not just highly suspect, but waiting to see what the opposition might have to say.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Oh, but the opposition was watching, and they didn't like what they saw.

• 35:26Speaker 00

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• 36:04Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 37:12Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 39:20Speaker 02

  A couple of months ago, I visited Seth Kaller, a famed dealer of historic documents in White Plains, New York. Statues of Abraham Lincoln were strewn about the office, advanced copies of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and original prints of the Constitution hung on the wall. "The Constitution: I Have a Dream," 'twas the night before Christmas.

• 39:42Speaker 10

  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 Clement Seymour.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Kaller became embroiled in the authorship question.

• 39:58Speaker 10

  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 of the arguments made against Clement Moore. So I kept going, even after I thought, "This is sufficient to, you know, make the case."

• 40:31Speaker 02

  You did send me quite a long document in preparation for this conversation.

• 40:35Speaker 10

  Yeah, and I could have sent you a lot more.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Kaller began to go through the claims in Don Foster's book, and he soon found that most of them were deeply suspicious. The comparable phraseology, that table confused me. Would you explain the origin of that table?

• 40:50Speaker 10

  Yes, let me find it.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Kaller got out a binder stuffed with papers. Nobody is taking this matter lightly. In fact, we spent an entire afternoon going through this. But let's stick to the big-ticket items today. First, style. Moore wouldn't write like this. But Kaller showed me a chart comparing parts of the poem with other poems Moore had written.

• 41:13Speaker 10

  Here's another, from another one of his writings. "'Twas an autumnal morn, celestial bright."

• 41:20Speaker 10

  The all snug and from something else he uses snug and tidy. Night before Christmas, he talks about visions of sugarplums dance in their heads. One of the rhymes in Night Before Christmas is a clatter and matter. And in another poem is. There are all these words, feelings, thoughts. Phrases. These would all be evidence that Moore 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.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  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 up either.

• 42:06Speaker 10

  But the fact that all the stories that the Livingston family have told can be actually disproven. You know, oh, it was taken by a nanny. And then you prove that, well, the nanny wasn't there for another eight years.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Also suspect Foster's finding that Moore was a humorless Scrooge, which was often a clear case of taking something Moore had written out of context.

• 42:29Speaker 10

  What I found wasn't just that it was misinterpreted, but that it was eluded to the point where if you just read the full sentence, it actually proves the opposite of what it's being used to argue.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Now, 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 funeral elegy, undermounting skepticism. And after he wrote an article seeming to suggest an innocent government scientist was responsible for sending the anthrax letters after September 11th, he was sued for libel, settled for some undisclosed amount of money, and went back to being predominantly a Vassar 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 in mine.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  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, refuse to leave unchallenged.

• 43:42Speaker 10

  And his book, Author 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 of he said, she said. But I don't blame the family as much as I blame some of the scholars who should know better. But it does, it does still bother 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, you know, you have to acknowledge that there was one, but you should not pretend

• 44:27Speaker 10

  that it's actually real.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  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 end to the mystery. It just wasn't the conclusion they'd hoped for.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 45:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  Ben, was there, was there one bit of evidence that for you really sealed the case?

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. This whole argument against Clement Clarke 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, and these researchers found not just one, but two effectively Christmas poems by Clement Clarke Moore that predate or are in tight sequence with A Visit from St. Nicholas. So the first is a letter called From St. Nicholas, which is literally in the voice of Santa Claus to Clement Clarke Moore's kid, which I guess, true to his haters, is about why she's not getting any presents that year. But it is very sweet. And crucially, it's

• 46:15Speaker 02

  an anapastic tetrameter. But this one is the one that I actually really love. The Melville scholar Scott Norsworthi thinks that this poem and A Visit from St. Nicholas were written at the same time. There was a snowstorm in New York on December 21st. It was a Saturday in 1822. He wrote this poem called Lines Written After a Snowstorm. I'll read it to you. "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 hands, nor need their native green, and every breeze appears to stand, all hushed to view the

• 46:59Speaker 02

  scene. You wonder how the snows were made, that dance upon the air, as if from purer worlds they strayed, so lightly and so fair. Perhaps they are the summer flowers and northern stars that bloom, wafted away from icy bowers to cheer our winter's gloom. Perhaps they're 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 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 fleeting vision teach truth you soon must

• 47:44Speaker 02

  know, that all the joys we here can reach are transient as the snow."

• 47:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  That says something.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  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 Jr. actually wrote this poem gets retold so often. It's another Christmasy inversion, one about as old as 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 grandfather's forgotten role in inventing Christmas. I don't believe it.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  But then again, tis the season. Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Nattif-Hafré, with Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Annika Robbins. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke Lamond. Engineering by David Herman at Good Studios and Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music was composed, arranged, and recorded by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira. I have stood on the shoulders of giants for this absurd episode. All credit to the scholars and writers who made this possible.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Scott Norsworthi of the Melvilliana Blog, Tom German, and Justin Fox. To our friends in Troy, the incomparable Duncan Querry, and city historian Kathy Sheehan. If I have 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 McDonald P. Jackson. Just be sure to read Scott Norsworthi'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.

• 50:22Malcolm Gladwell?

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