Case (Almost) Closed on Who Wrote ‘The Night Before Christmas’
A new textual analysis should put to rest a long-running debate about whether Clement Clarke Moore was truly the poem’s author.
The author still stands.
Photographer: Steven A. Henry/WireImage/Getty Images
Two hundred years ago this week, on Dec. 23, 1823, a poem was published anonymously (as most poems were in those days) in the Troy Sentinel in upstate New York. “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house,” it began.
In 1836, New York City divinity school professor and major landowner Clement Clarke Moore submitted the verses under his name and the title “A Visit From St. Nicholas” for a poetry anthology that was published the next year. For the rest of his life, he was acknowledged and acclaimed as their author. Around the time of Moore’s death in 1863, though, a granddaughter of Henry Livingston Jr., a long-dead farmer, surveyor and Revolutionary War veteran from Poughkeepsie, a city about midway between New York and Troy, saw a copy of the poem with Moore’s name on it and cried foul. Her grandfather had written it, she believed, and recited it to his children in 1808 or so. Her mother and other relatives agreed.