In last year's post on favorable Melville notices in Walter N. Haldeman's Louisville Courier, I identified and transcribed glowing reviews there of Redburn, White-Jacket, and Israel Potter. One item that I could not locate back then turned up today, Haldeman's ecstatic review of Mardi. I suppose it was Haldeman who praised Melville as
"a limner of unequalled power.— He is a Tenniers, a Salvator Rosa, a Claude Lorraine, and a Raphael according to the scene before him."
Transcribed below from the May 1, 1849 issue of the Louisville Morning Courier. (Although filed by Newspapers.com with online archives of The Louisville Daily Courier, the masthead of this May 1, 1849 issue reads "Morning Courier.")
We are indebted to the courtesy of Morton & Griswold for a copy of
Mardi; and a voyage thither. By Herman Melville. In two volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers.
The wonderful popularity of this author, and its continuance, shows how substantial the merits are upon which it rests. He has no rival in his sketches of sea life. Nothing seems to come amiss to his expanded genius; his soul drinks in the full inspiration of every scene that crosses his vision, and for the time being he becomes part and parcel of it. The majesty of the Ocean in storm or tempest, its magnificent repose, the clustering islands that breathe in beauty upon its face, the mountains looming far in the distance, all the enchantments of land, of ocean, and sky, find in Melville a limner of unequalled power.— He is a Tenniers, a Salvator Rosa, a Claude Lorraine, and a Raphael according to the scene before him. There is an ample store of vitality in all the weavings of his brain. The tissue is always of the finest material, but is nevertheless very substantial. He always carries his readers with him in spite of themselves, he infuses the spirit of his scenes into all their feelings, and moves them as with the wand of an enchanter.
In the work before us we have the same graphic power that has given celebrity to his name, both in Europe and America, but it is more matured, more elevated, more careful than in his other volumes. What higher compliment could be given to his authorship than is found in the fact that the English Reviewers refused to believe that his former works were written by a sailor? They were equally incredulous about the book of Ross Browne on the Whale Fisheries, but in the superior education of our navy compared to that of England, "the flag that has braved the battle and the breeze, for a thousand years" may find a hint that its supremacy cannot live forever.
We shall make some extracts from this work soon, in order to give our readers a taste of its quality, but we beg leave to commend the work to their regard. --Louisville Morning Courier, May 1, 1849
On April 25, 1849 Haldeman promised, "we shall notice the work tomorrow," but the review of Mardi would not appear until May 1, 1849.
This new work of Melville contains much to excite and gratify curiosity. Its hero had his birth on the mountains of Berkshire, and was inured to hardness by labor and deprivations incident to new settlers. At 18, deeming himself harshly treated by his father, he ran away, became a trapper, and at length with the avails of his furs purchased a lot of land, which with improvements he sold in a year or two; and soon after we find him in the battle of Bunker Hill, and afterwards at sea, and then a captive in England--escaping from his captors, and using such means as he could to retain his liberty working out for such light compensation as he could get, at one time in the garden of George III, who discovered his Yankee lineage, but did not betray him--was found out by some men of distinction, who were opposed to the war on the colonies, and sent by them on a confidential message to Dr. Franklin, then at Paris: afterwards with Paul Jones in sundry expeditions around the coast of England and Scotland. What portion of this book is true history, and what were embellishments, we know not; but there is little danger that it will not be read.
Two weeks before (April 3, 1855), the Christian Mirror had described Melville's Israel Potter as "Beautifully executed." This brief but favorable mention of Melville's new book appeared with similar notices of volumes just received.
The following week, Friday, May 26, it will be “Thar She Blows” a concert by the string quartet, Aurea Ensemble. The performance will be a tribute Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” with sea shanties as well as music by Beethoven and Webern. There will also be readings from “Moby-Dick” and Melville’s letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the man to whom he dedicated his classic novel. --Joe Burns via Wicked Local Wellfleet
Curtis's chapter on "Dead Kings" reminds me of the "After Dinner" chapter in the first volume of Mardi. The one on "Memnon" naturally makes me think of Pierre, although Curtis never displays this much depth, pathos, or eloquence:
But Memnon's sculptured woes did once melodiously resound; now all is mute. Fit emblem that of old, poetry was a consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life; but in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm alike the monument and the dirge. --Herman Melville in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
... Some
of the descriptions are exquisitely beautiful, and a dreamy languor
pervades the volume, which has something of the charm of a tropical
climate. From the style and way of thinking, we at first thought that it
might have been written by the author of Typee; but though it appears
that this is not the case, we doubt if it would have been written,
unless Melville had given a previous specimen of this kind of style. We
are glad to see this book, but we should be very sorry if this method of
writing were to prevail, or if American young men were to imagine that
there was not some higher purpose in foreign travel, than the mere
gratification of a taste for artistic effects.
Published in Boston by David Reed, the Christian Register was regarded as "the leading Unitarian weekly" according to information about Unitarian Christian Journals provided on the website of the American Unitarian Conference. The 1851 masthead of the Christian Register lists five editors: J. H. Morison, E. Peabody, A. P. Peabody, J. Parkman, and F. D. Huntington.
Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh wee, Henry, you ain't movin' me; You better feel that boogie beat, And get the lead out of your feet. -- Zola Taylor and The Platters; also Etta James
"The Night Before Christmas" will ever be a Shakespeare-Bacon sort of affair. -- Commodore Robert Gracey Denig (1851-1924), as quoted or paraphrased by his wife Jeannie Livingston Hubbard Denig.
Herman Melville gave his next book after Moby-Dick the richly suggestive alternative title, "The Ambiguities." True Melville fans must delight in uncertainty and mystery, and find pleasure in endlessly debating insoluble problems of belief and doubt. Fortunately for us, lots of things in life and literature are unknowable. Who wrote "The Night Before Christmas" is not one of them, however.
Colleagues and friends knew Clement C. Moore as an amiable seminary professor and, in the words of Philip Hone, a multi-talented "scholar, musician, florist, bard." Moore definitely wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas," aka "The Night Before Christmas.” Henry Livingston, Jr. of Poughkeepsie by all accounts was a hardy patriot, genial family man, respectable farmer and surveyor, capable painter, and in his way, a clever wordsmith. In short, a model American citizen...although in our time, Livingston's pig-headed insistence that "No" means "Yes" in affairs of the heart could get him in big trouble on, say, a visit to Vassar College.
The dame with whom Phoebus sups nightly below:
And what the girls mean when they cry out no, no. --Apollo Rebus
With the word ladies use, tho their bosoms cry Yes
When the man of their choice for their hands fondly press. --Monarchs Rebus
The word ladies use tho their bosoms cry yes,
When the lads, saucy fellows! their suits fondly press: --Alcmena Rebus
The flow'r whose tints in your cheeks sweetly glow
And the word maidens mean when they faintly cry no! --Sages Rebus
What the pretty girls cry tho their meaning is yes
When swains at their feet ask the boon of a kiss. --War Rebus
But Livingston could never have penned the poem that begins "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," first published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823 under the heading, "ACCOUNT OF A VISIT FROM ST. NICHOLAS." The length of the Christmas poem, the narrative mode and father-with-children perspective and content, the strong element of fantasy, the penchant for similes with the word like, and skillful use of epic simile were all beyond Livingston's range of interest and ability as demonstrated in his extant poetry. Here's why it's Moore, no contest.
To start with, Moore claimed "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and Livingston didn't. As Moore stated in his published 1844 letter to Charles King, editor of the New York American, he originally wrote the Christmas poem "not for publication, but to amuse my children."
Clement C. Moore on the authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas"
New York American, March 1, 1844
In January 1829, newspaper editor Orville Holley alluded to Moore as the author of "Visit." Holley's puns on Moore's name gave away the author's identity to alert readers:
"We have been given to understand that the author of them [lines on St. Nicholas] belongs by birth and residence to the city of New York, and that he is a gentleman of more merit as a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions." --quoted in Troy's One Hundred Years.
Later Holley revealed in the Ontario Repository and Freeman [Canandaigua, New York] that he had known of Moore's authorship within a few months (not years) of the poem's first anonymous publication in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823:
The following lines appeared in print for the first time—though very often copied since—in the Troy Sentinel of December 23, 1823, which paper we then conducted. They were introduced, on that occasion, with the following remarks; which, as they continue to be a true expression of our opinion of the charming simplicity and cordiality of the lines, as well as of our unchanged feelings toward the little people to whom they are addressed, we repeat them, only observing that although when we first published them, we did not know who wrote them, yet, not many months afterwards we learnt that they came from the pen of a most accomplished scholar and and estimable man, a professor in one of our colleges....--Ontario Repository and Freeman, December 28, 1836; reprinted in the Auburn Journal and Advertiser onWednesday, January 4, 1837.
On February 20, 1824, the Troy Sentinel also published, anonymously, an untitled poem by Moore that eventually would appear with corrections and revisions in Moore's 1844 Poems, under the title Lines Written after a Snow-Storm. Moore's "Snow-Storm" never went viral like "Visit," but the lovely lines found admiring readers, as shown when the Providence, Rhode Island American reprinted them "From the Troy Sentinel" on March 2, 1824.Published only two months after "Visit," Moore's snow poem is explicitly addressed to the speaker's children. It seems likely that the two poems were composed around the same time. Significant verbal parallels with "Visit" include the shared beds/heads rhyme, the simile with the trigram "as the snow," and the words dance, vision, and winter's. As in the case of "Visit," the first printing of Moore's "Snow-Storm" poem was unauthorized and contained errors that would be corrected in the later book version. For example, "ivy bowers" in the original 1824 printing was corrected to "icy bowers" in the 1844 book version. The Providence American reprinted "ivy bowers" from the Troy Sentinel. Evidently the Rhode Island editor did not perceive the error, or did not think it worth correcting.
When requested by the publisher of The New-York Book of Poetry, Moore submitted "Visit" and three additional poems for inclusion in the 1837 anthology.
The whole point of this anthology was to credit native New Yorkers for their worthy contributions to American literature, many of which (like Moore's "Visit") had been published anonymously in newspapers and magazines. From 1837 on, Moore claimed "Visit" as his work, openly and repeatedly. Livingston did not claim it, or even acknowledge its existence, ever. After his death in 1828, none of Henry Livingston's numerous children ever made any public claim their father wrote "Visit."
Moore’s authorship of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was acknowledged frequently by the best informed editors and literary critics of Moore's time including Charles King, William Cullen Bryant, Charles Fenno Hoffman, John Keese, W. A. Jones, Evert A. Duyckinck, and Edmund Clarence Stedman. Physical evidence of Moore's claim to authorship has survived in the form of numerous inscribed copies of Moore's 1844 Poems with "A Visit from St. Nicholas" printed on pages 124-127.
The printed broadside (now held by the Museum of the City of New York) with corrections in Moore's hand supplies additional physical evidence of Moore's authorship, materially linking Moore directly to the poem that only he published under his name.
Four extant manuscripts of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" display Moore's consistent and distinctive manner of handwriting, precise yet oddly medieval or pseudo-elvish in appearance.
Four manuscripts penned by Moore, a biblical scholar, philanthropist and father of nine, survive: in The Strong Museum, The Huntington Library, The New-York Historical Society, and one in private hands. --Seth Kaller
Each of these surviving copies serves to corroborate the fact of Moore's claim to authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Moore was claiming the poem every time he wrote it out for admirers.
"A Visit from St. Nicholas" manuscript by Clement Clarke Moore
New-York Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons
The surviving manuscript copy at The New-York Historical Society is accompanied by a key witness letter (from a cousin of Henry Livingston, Jr!) dated March 15, 1862, fully and decisively affirming Clement C. Moore's authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" aka "The Night Before Christmas." Addressed to the Librarian of the Historical Society, the letter from T. W. C. Moore was first published in The New York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin 2.4 (January 1919) pages 111-115. Digitized volumes, accessible online:
For all that, the circumstances of anonymous publication and rapid, widespread circulation in newspapers practically guaranteed an authorship controversy somewhere down the road. Quite understandably, some Livingston descendants came to believe the most accomplished poet of their own family wrote "The Night Before Christmas." But the family legend was never supportable or sustainable by facts. Early on, key claims by family members for Major Livingston's authorship depended on evidence that was non-existent and therefore could never be produced: of a lost or destroyed manuscript (non-existent); of prior publication (before 1823) in a Poughkeepsie newspaper (non-existent); of a simple mistake in attribution, caused or compounded by Clement C. Moore's apparent failure to claim authorship (false supposition). Furthermore, the first deceased artist to receive credit for Moore's "A Visit from St.
Nicholas" was not Henry Livingston, Jr., anyhow, but somebody named Joseph Wood. When notified
of the false claim for Wood in the Washington National Intelligencer,
Clement C. Moore dutifully, promptly, and very publicly asserted his own claim to the poem as his own
"literary property, however small the intrinsic value of that property
may be." Moore's friend Charles King printed Moore's letter of protest
in the New York American, and demanded a formal correction from the National Intelligencer.
In reply (March 6, 1844), the National Intelligencer editor observed that his paper had already issued a satisfactory correction, in a reader's letter published on December 28, 1843:
Washington Daily National Intelligencer - December 28, 1843
Messrs. EDITORS: I perceive in your paper of the 25th instant that an extract from the beautiful little poem entitled "A Visit from St Nicholas" is given to the pen of Jos. Wood. This is a mistake. It is well known to be the production of CLEMENT C. MOORE, of the city of New York, and is published as his in the volume of American Poems edited by John Keese.
Very respectfully, &c.
C.
There was no argument, and no reason to debate Moore's "well known" authorship of "A Visit from. St. Nicholas." The Washington editor on March 6, 1844 assured Charles King that if the National Intelligencer had not already published the necessary correction back in December of the previous year, he would "have pleasure in complying with the request" to reprint Moore's letter to the New York American.
Sad to say, Livingston descendants have been badly served by English professors, in particular the ex-Vassar president Henry Noble MacCracken, and authorship specialists Don Foster and MacDonald P. Jackson. When they want to, English profs with formal training in 18th and 19th
century literature, poetry and poetics, prosody, source study, and/or children's
literature can enlighten misguided claimants for Henry Livingston,
Jr., and help all of us to a better understanding of what's going on in
and with "The Night Before Christmas." To date, the most illuminating and praiseworthy studies with a specifically literary perspective are those by Ruth K. MacDonald in her 1983 article on Santa Claus in America; and Pat Pflieger, in her 2001 exhibition catalog essay on "Clement Clarke Moore and 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'" (available online at merrycoz.org). In 2002, Oak Knoll Press published the now indispensable Descriptive Bibliography of "The Night Before Christmas" by Nancy H. Marshall, retired Dean
of University Libraries at The College of William and Mary. For the most part, however, literary scholars have been content to leave Clement
C. Moore's "The Night Before Christmas" to the care of popular culture
and the public domain. The most thorough and satisfying academic reading of "The Night Before Christmas" in print is by a historian, Stephen Nissenbaum, in The Battle for Christmas.
While we're waiting for an unbiased English professor to show up, one or more of the following excellent resources may prove useful:
Joe Nickell upholds the Moore claim in his important two-part study for Manuscripts, the quarterly journal of The Manuscript Society. Nickell's published articles are "The Case of the Christmas Poem” in Manuscripts 54 (Fall 2002): 293-308; and “The Case of the Christmas Poem: Part 2” in Manuscripts 55 (Winter 2003): 5-15. Cited by Emily Kingery.
Deal-Breaker #1: 542 = too many total words for Henry to handle.
"A Visit from St. Nicholas" contains 542 words. That job would have seriously overworked Henry Livingston, Jr., who almost never wrote poems that long. Table 13.1 on pages 65-67 of Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas? by MacDonald P. Jackson gives counts of "Total Words" in poems attributed to Henry Livingston, Jr. Jackson's table already excludes eleven poems of less than 100 words. Only ten of fifty-four listed exceed 300 words. Only six poems attributed to Henry Livingston, Jr. exceed 400 words. Two of these longer poems, the 1803 and 1819 Carrier Addresses, are probably not by Henry Livingston, Jr. anyway. Isaac Mitchell of the Political Barometer most likely wrote the 1803 Carrier Address for the newspaper that he edited and co-founded. The 1819 Carrier Address in the Poughkeepsie Journal features words that Livingston never understood how to use properly, including two instances of the conventionally poetic word "ere." Drop the two Carrier Addresses of doubtful authorship and we're left with two bland fables, one talking gold coin ("American Eagle"), and the playful verse-letter to his brother Beekman, about as good as Livingston ever gets in verse.
At 530 words, Adventures of an American Eagle, if it really is by Henry Livingston, Jr., seems the closest of Livingston's four longer pieces to "A Visit from St. Nicholas," both in terms of total words and date of publication (March 20, 1822). With its labored premise and clunky moral, "American Eagle" is no steal of a deal. You wouldn't bother toting it to Antiques Roadshow.
At most, the average length of the 54 poems evaluated by Jackson after excluding very short poems of less than 100 words is 228 words (12,303/54). Moore's average, even without adding in "Charles Elphinstone," is 20,556/32 = 642 words. Adding "Sand" back in plus the manuscript poems would bring up the average to 38,714/47 = 824 words.
Deal-Breaker # 2: Narrative poetry is not Henry's thing.
Length alone practically disqualifies Livingston, before we read one word of his poetry. When we do get around to reading actual poems by Henry Livingston, Jr. (available online, thanks to Mary S. Van Deusen and her enormously valuable Henry Livingston site), we may be surprised to learn, after 100 years of authorship hoopla, that he hardly ever writes narrative fiction in verse (the story-telling mode of "A Night Before Christmas"), and never narrates for children except in morally instructive fables. In narrative, something happens. The Christmas poem, as its original title promises, narrates the visit of St. Nicholas. The story has an identifiable speaker, the husband of "Mamma" and father of sweetly slumbering children. This confessedly paternal speaker tells a story that unfolds over time. The action of "Visit" has a beginning, middle, and end. Beginning: everyone's in bed. Middle: tomfoolery on the lawn, followed by a magical home invasion. End: they all got away. The core domestic narrative is embellished with fantastical and comical details about the appearance of Santa and his reindeer, and some choice descriptive elements drawn from nature--moon and snow, leaves and wind.
Joe Nickell calls the Christmas poem "a magical children's ballad" The "ballad" classification seems appealing but also arguable, too, considering how sophisticated the language and poetical devices are in places. Ballads typically employ simpler language and more frequent use of repetition than we find in "Visit." Nonetheless, in Part II of "The Case of the Christmas Poem" (pages 9-10), Dr. Nickell makes essentially the same point I am urging here, that Livingston nowhere approximates either the narrative form or magical content of "A Visit from St. Nicholas."
Nineteenth-century critics had no difficulty placing "A Visit from St. Nicholas" in the genre of nursery rhyme. "Visit" features the anapestic meter and narrative mode of discourse typically found in poems for children. Also on display in "Visit" is a lively blend of fantasy with the narration of ordinary domestic routines. All of these qualities coalesce in the new wave of British "toy books," illustrated books for children that were published in London during the first decade of the 19th century and available for sale no later than 1813 in American book shops. The most popular and influential of these early children's books were The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast by William Roscoe (2nd ed. London, 1808); and The Peacock at Home (London, 1807). At the close of the dinner party for birds in the Peacock story, both the action and words resemble the end of "A Visit from St. Nicholas." In the Christmas poem, Santa shouts his parting benediction ("Happy Christmas" etc.) and "away they all flew." The 1807 story does not tell us how, exactly; but the Peacock's house-guests left in the same fashion:
So they chirp'd, in full chorus, a friendly adieu;
And, with hearts quite as light as the plumage that grew
On their merry-thought bosoms, away they all flew….. --The Peacock at Home
Prospective gifts of "some books" (on New Year's Day, probably) and "toys" are mentioned in Clement C. Moore's verse letter to his daughter Charity Elizabeth (1816-1830), titled From Saint Nicholas. Blessed with a rich and loving father, little Charity had her own "nursy" and would have been overjoyed to get such books as these English imports in her stocking, if she or her sister Margaret (1815-1845) did not already have them. That unfairly maligned letter FROM SAINT NICHOLAS, by the way, testifies to, besides paternal love, Moore's facility with anapestic meter and magic in a narrative clearly written to amuse and edify one of his own children.
To see how Major Livingston handles narrative, we need to visit Mary S. Van Deusen's page with All Henry Livingston Poetry. The very first piece there, Easter, does offer a kind of narrative, the familiar Christian narrative of redemption. This 1784 poem is developed in large-scale archetypes, with no individualizing details, and is delivered remotely in the third person. Similar poems with similarly religious themes and relatively distant, impersonal narration are Livingston's versified translations from specific biblical texts in
The setting, theme, and subjects of An Invitation to the Country are conventionally pastoral. The poem evinces Livingston's fondness for allegorical personification (Avarice, Ambition), and a weakness for preaching that he shares with Clement C. Moore. The action is static, presenting situations and types, but no real story. Other poems that exhibit Livingston's distinctive blend of pastoral themes and personified abstractions are
In the elegiac mode, Livingston wrote memorials in verse for Montgomery
Tappen, his first wife Sarah Livingston, their child Henry Welles
Livingston, Gilbert Cortlandt, Catharine Livingston, and Catharine
Breese.
Other poems attributed to Livingston may be classified as amorous verse. Several (for example "To Spadille" and "The Fly") have witty lines by a lover to or about his mistress, somewhat after the manner of the seventeenth-century Cavalier poets. Poems in the humorous vein of "The Acknowledgement" feature a more polished and elegant style, more typical of neoclassical models by, for example, Dryden and Pope.
Twelve, at least, of the sixty-five poems attributed to Henry Livingston, Jr. are Rebuses or Acrostics. Conventional features of eighteenth-century periodicals, Rebuses are puzzle poems "that provided clues to letters or syllables that spell out words" (as helpfully defined in The Citizen Poets of Boston, ed. Paul Lewis, page 178). These word puzzles are characteristic devices for Livingston, whose preferred mode
involves some formally controlled display of wit.
Besides translations from biblical texts, narrative verse by Livingston is mostly confined to a particular and distinctive literary genre, the fable (defined at Literary Devices as "a concise and brief story intended to provide a moral lesson at the end"). In fables, animals or other non-human characters behave like humans. Livingston carefully copied several verse fables into the manuscript book of his grown daughter Jane. Along with "Crane & Fox" Jane's manuscript book contains Livingston's grim Fable of the Bat and the cautionary tale of Midas. (Livingston's neat script and closing flourishes there make one think he would have been glad to write out "A Visit from St. Nicholas," too, had he really written it.) The Crane & Fox, dated 1827 in manuscript, retells old Aesop's story of The Fox and The Stork. All the fables attributed to Livingston are in iambic tetrameter. A few bits of dialogue and added descriptive details make "Crane & Fox" more engaging than most of Livingston's fables. Other pieces by Livingston in the genre of fable are The vine & oak, published in the New-York Magazine for February 1791, and (maybe) Adventures of an American Eagle, published over the signature of "R" on March 20, 1822 in the Poughkeepsie Journal.
In all of Livingston's fables the closing moral governs the action. All but one are told objectively, in the third person. Only "American Eagle" is narrated in the first person, reporting a series of mercantile exchanges from the point of view of a well-traveled coin made of gold. The meter is always iambic tetrameter, more or less. By contrast, Clement C. Moore's The Pig and the Rooster offers a fun exercise in anapestic tetrameter, the meter of "The Night Before Christmas" and the usual meter of nursery-rhymes. Despite energetic hating by advocates for Livingston's authorship of "The Night Before Christmas," this one animal fable by Moore is longer and appreciably lighter in tone and style than Livingston's comparatively heavy-handed productions. Moore's moral in "The Pig and the Rooster" boils down to something like, "to each his own," which sounds about as lighthearted as anyone could want or expect in an animal fable. Stretching out in 783 words, Moore takes more care to individualize his animal characters through dialogue and descriptive details. Plus, unlike any of Livingston's much shorter animal fables, "The Pig and the Rooster" shares the distinctive vocabulary of "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Thirteen instances from my list of eight great favorite expressions of Clement C. Moore occur in "The Pig and the Rooster." The Christmas poem has fifteen from the same list.
Outside of fables, the few examples of quasi-narrative verse by Henry Livingston, Jr. occur in the form of letters. Frequently cited for supposed parallels to "The Night Before Christmas" are Livingston's anapestic Letter to my brother Beekman and Translation of a letter from a tenant of Mrs. Van Kleeck--as also discussed by Joe Nickell in Part II of "The Case of the Christmas Poem." Dr. Nickell does not cite the likely model for Livingston's verse letters, The New Bath Guide by Christopher Anstey. For many decades, anapestic satire in the manner of Anstey was all the rage. In Anstey and Anapestic Satire in the Late Eighteenth Century, Martin S. Day provides helpful literary and historical background for understanding this important influence on Henry Livingston's experiments with epistolary verse. Apart from the fun of it, reading Anstey along with some of his many imitators and successors confronts you with the ordinariness of words and rhymes that verse letters by Henry Livingston, Jr. share with "The Night Before Christmas."
Yes, I'm talking about clatter and matter; and belly and jelly; and even elf and self.
The annually recycled claim for Livingston leans hard on the casual impression of uncanny correspondences between jingling anapests and select rhymes in a few pieces by Major Livingston and the meter and rhymes of "A Visit from St. Nicholas." As the example of Anstey demonstrates, however, what Livingston's work shares with "Visit" is a common poetical heritage.
For in TABITHA's chamber I heard such a clatter,
I could not conceive what the deuce was the matter.... --The New Bath Guide
According to Day, the best known of Anstey's epistles by "Simkin" were Letter 11, satirizing "a fashionable ball" and Letter 13, "celebrating an uproarious public breakfast given by Lord Ragamuffin" with a parody of 'Alexander's Feast' by Dryden.
The meter and rhymes that Livingston family members associated exclusively with Henry Livingston, Jr. in fact were thoroughly
conventional by the time he used them in the 1780's and 1790's. Twelve of the rhymes in "The Night Before Christmas" occur in one poem, A Burlesque Translation of Homer by Thomas Bridges.
Also indebted to Anstey, the aforementioned Peacock at Home and other new books that modeled the use of anapestic tetrameter in fun verses for children. Peacock was described in The British Critic as
"a specimen of playful wit conducted by genius, judgment, and taste, such
as has not been seen since the publication of that, which in some
points it resembles, the Bath Guide."
Extracts from this British review of The Butterfly's Ball and Peacock at Home appeared in the New York Commercial Advertiser on March 12, 1808, after both works had been reprinted by David Longworth in the first number of The Substitute.
New York Oracle and Daily Advertiser - March 5, 1808
Anstey influenced everybody--including Clement C. Moore, as evidenced by the rhymes and style of "The Pig and the Rooster." The New York Society Library has a 1768 copy of Anstey's The New Bath Guide, signed for in 1805 by Gulian Verplanck, according to early circulation records which end in that year, accessible via the City Readers project.
In good eighteenth-century fashion, Henry Livingston, Jr. gravitates to satire and the cold comfort of material facts, away from overly sentimental displays of emotion. The satirical tone of Major Livingston's prose is exemplified in published burlesques on Astronomical Intelligence and Antiquity an Universality of the English Language. In prose or verse, writings by Livingston exhibit the typical eighteenth-century bias for reason over feelings, head over heart. By contrast, "heart" turns out to be one of Moore's all-time favorite words--as MacDonald P. Jackson accurately reports in the back of Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"? in a footnote to chapter 16.
So Livingston avoids narrative except in fables, and rarely adopts the first-person point of view unless he's writing a letter. When Livingston does narrate events in the first person, he borrows the tone, meter, epistolary form, and a good deal of the diction from anapestic satire in the manner of the inescapable Christopher Anstey. Livingston addresses his unpublished satirical letters to adults only, whereas Moore wrote and published lightly satirical narrative verse ("A Trip to Saratoga" and "The Pig and the Rooster") with his children in mind.
Deal-Breaker #3: Henry has no use or capacity for fantasy, here and now.
Another deal-breaker is the glaring absence of fantasy in the modest body of poetic work attributed to Henry Livingston, Jr. No extant poem by Livingston features anything like the intersection of the mundane and the marvelous in "A Visit from St. Nicholas." The mix of fantasy and reality is what makes "The Night Before Christmas" so charming. A regular Joe jumped out of bed and actually saw Santa Claus! In the flesh! Nothing magical or fantastical appears in Livingston's fables beyond conventions of the genre, like talking animals and trees. Anthropomorphized characters interact with each other in the service of a controlling moral lesson, as they always do in fables. And Livingston generally adds the word "fable" in his titles, as if to emphasize their unreality and unbelievability. Talking animals, plants, and 10-dollar gold coins never once invade Poughkeepsie or magically inhabit any familiar, real-world setting.
The "jolly old elf" of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" with his "miniature sleigh" and "eight tiny reindeer" is a
kind of fairy. As Ruth K. MacDonald has explained, the enumeration of reindeer
names imitates the naming of Queen Mab's fairy attendants
in Nimphidia by Michael Drayton. The author of "Visit" must be steeped in fairy lore. Livingston knows one fairy, Oberon. Shakespeare's famous king of the fairies appeals to Livingston when he needs the letter "O" as the correct answer to a verbal riddle in one of his Rebus poems, and when he wants a handy figure for the freedom and happiness of childhood.
In the poem to Timmy Dwight, nothing of fairyland graces the youngster's active life as portrayed by Livingston's speaker. Timmy (Tommy in the printed version) plays ball, flies kites, shoots marbles, plays hide-and-seek, and eats like a vulture. The kid's mundane fun and games are sympathetically rendered, but nothing very amazing happens. There's no magic to brighten Timmy's completely earthbound life. No fairies, either. Livingston presents Timmy's imagined playmates as real children, not imaginary friends.
In some poems Livingston introduces gods, goddesses and other elements from classical mythology. However, such creatures as the fluttering Cupids in The Fly function as adornment of a highly artificial setting, one with no pretensions of realism. Livingston's earliest angels, those who guard his infant daughter in the 1775 poem On my little Catherine sleeping are by far his best creative inventions. At the age of 27 the soldier and new father still believed in them, and so do we. By contrast, the seraphs of An Invitation to the Country who bless the innocent rural pleasures commended by the speaker are cardboard cut-outs of angels, part of the fabricated set. Here Livingston's angels seem no more real than his personified abstractions of Avarice, Ambition, and Dissipation.
Even when dealing with real people and events, Livingston has a hard time keeping personified abstractions out of his writing. In the poem To my little niece Sally Livingston, the merry tune of Sally's favorite songbird (now dead and buried) is said to have charmed an imposing quintuplet of allegorical figures: Labour, Study, Dissipation, Grief, and Ambition.
Excluding very short pieces, Livingston's average word total still is less than half of the 542 total words in "The Night Before Christmas." Livingston saves the narrative mode for fables and satire. He rarely employs the first person in poetry outside of one or two verse letters, written in the reigning comedic style of Christopher Anstey. From the evidence of available poems on Mary S. Van Deusen's Henry Livingston website, Livingston's range of imagination extends only so far as required by the genre at hand. Livingston's animals, birds, flowers, angels, insects, Cupids, mythical nymphs and graces never spring to life. Rather, they decorate his generic exercises in religious hymns, Rebuses, various pastoral settings, Cavalier love poetry, elegy, epistolary satire, and fable, hanging there like Styrofoam ornaments on a fake Christmas tree.
What about Moore then? In the first place, Clement C. Moore relishes the narrative mode and loves to stretch out. The first offering in Moore's 1844 volume Poems is a long narrative poem by Moore titled "A Trip to Saratoga." In Part II of his superb article There Arose Such a Clatter (published in Common-Place in January 2001, and still accessible online)
Stephen Nissenbaum helpfully reads "Saratoga" as light and family-friendly social satire. "Saratoga" exhibits Moore's considerable skill with narrative, while also sharing the father-with-children theme (never developed anywhere in Livingston's poetry) and much of the vocabulary of "A Visit from St. Nicholas." In "Visit" the nameless father (the only one awake on Christmas Eve) flies to the window for a closer look at some trouble out on the lawn. In "Saratoga" the widower "Henry Mildmay" makes his children run to the open window and close it, to shut out the rapidly approaching thunderstorm:
"Down with the windows, run, here comes the gust,
Quick, quick, the wind has veer'd—See! what a flash!"
The
repeated word "flew" in the Christmas poem occurs twice in Moore's
"Saratoga," both times in constructions with parallel syntax as well as
diction:
Moore wrote more lines of narrative verse in one poem than Livingston wrote lines of poetry. In manuscript, Moore's looooong narrative poem Charles Elphinstone presents an ambitious cosmic allegory of temptation, sin, and redemption: 13,670 total words by Jackson's count, surpassing the count of 12,599 total words in all poems by Henry Livingston combined. The first word is "I" for the Poet, Moore as the Miltonic or Dantean Bard who will narrate the story. The Poet's opening invocation to his Muse acknowledges the awesome power of human imagination to shape "dreams" into something with "real semblance":
And thou, my Guardian Angel, deign to guide
My wand'ring fancy by thy heav'nly power;
And to its dreams such real semblance give
As Truth herself and Reason may approve.
Livingston never aims so high. Reason rules for both men, but Livingston's eighteenth century world-view consistently prohibits outbreaks of fancy. Hence, the absence of magic in poems attributed to Henry Livingston, Jr. For Livingston, "fancy" exists to be curbed. Fancy should never wander, never get too real. But Moore's "wand'ring fancy" is the very attribute that allowed him to witness Santa and his reindeer in the snow that moonlit Christmas Eve. The main premise of "Elphinstone," spiritual warfare on earth between the invisible powers of heaven and hell, involves the kind of interaction we find in "The Night Before Christmas" between supposedly real and utterly fantastical elements. Certainly Moore, too, has his limits. He won't mess with Satan in Hell, so he invents a subordinate devil named Cosmocrator. Moore imagines Cosmocrator as "the arch-fiend" on earth to whom Satan sends hordes of "hell-train'd imps" for further orders in the battle for human souls. Cosmocrator is not the anti-Christ, but he might be the anti-Santa Claus.
"Charles Elphinstone" is not the only place where Moore reveals his apprehension of the fantastic in narrative verse. Two pieces in Moore's 1844 anthology Poems describe encounters between a perceptive human and a visitant from the world of fairyland, an elf or sprite. In To the Nymphs of Mount Harmony, an allegory of the Greek struggle for independence, a shepherd meets with a woodland elf who narrates a woeful tale of captivity and oppression by a fiend from hell. In "Nymphs" Moore employs the usual mythology of pastoral
poetry more familiarly and adeptly than Livingston ever did. The "wond'ring ear" of Moore's Arcadian shepherd
nicely harmonizes with the speaker's famously "wondering eyes" in "The
Night Before Christmas." As pointed out in my first blog-review of Jackson's Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"?:
It takes a wondering ear to hear talking elves and fairies in the woods,
just like it takes wondering eyes to see Santa Claus on the lawn, under
the moonlight. --Computer Error, please try again
In his Apology for Not Accepting an Invitation to a Ball Moore himself narrates the elaborate story of a visitation from fairyland by a diminutive guardian spirit, described as a kind of elf, "far below the human size." Fantastic as the whole story seems, Moore claims to believe it:
Of magic zones and rings you oft have heard,
By faries on their favorites conferred.
Which pinch'd the wearers sore, or made them bleed,
Whene'er they went astray in thought or deed.
Nor think these stories false because they're old,
But true as this which soon I will unfold.
Whoever he is, the author of "The Night Before Christmas" needs to believe in magic. And fairies like Santa Claus. Moore does, and how! Including his manuscript Biography of the heart, the word magic occurs at least ten times in Moore's extant poetry. Forms of fairy/fairies occur seven times. The body of poems attributed to Henry Livingston, Jr. on Mary S. Van Deusen's amazing website contains only one instance of "magical," and that occurs in the 1803 Carrier Address which Livingston probably did not write. Of doubtful authorship, the 1803 News-boy's Address to the Patrons of the Political Barometer was more likely written by Isaac Mitchell, editor of the Political Barometer. All five of Livingston's five usages of fairy/fairies refer to Oberon. The most elaborate treatment of Oberon by Livingston takes up four lines of his War Rebus on Cornelia Tappen:
With the King of the fairies that sly jealous sprite
Who sleeps all the day but who gambols all night
Green Caty-dids draw him—a nutshell contains him,
His kingdom a meadow & a dew-drop sustains him.
Although described here with admirable precision and detail, Livingston's Oberon remains, nonetheless, a puzzle-piece who exists for the sake of the Rebus in which he is stuck. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, faeries memorably interact with human characters (Titania with Bottom; Puck with Lysander and Demetrius) on Oberon's orders, but Livingston's Oberon shows no sign of jumping out of his nutshell carriage to greet the poet or gambol with any human being.
In American literature c. 1823, the preeminent verse fairy tale was Drake's The Culprit Fay, only composed in 1819 and not yet dissected and disparaged by Edgar Allan Poe in the Southern Literary Messenger.
Placing Clement C. Moore where he belongs, in the
company of Drake and Halleck as a writer of "familiar verse," Brander Matthews favors Moore's
"Visit" over anything of theirs, including "Culprit Fay":
In
fact, nothing of Halleck's or Drake's, whether written by either singly
or by both in collaboration, has revealed so vigorous a vitality as the
charming and fanciful 'Visit from St. Nicholas' of another New Yorker,
their contemporary, Clement C. Moore. --Brander Matthews
Deal-Breaker #4: Henry does not much like similes with like.
One of the best Moore-markers in the world is the word "like" which
Moore uses 132 times, at least, to Livingston's 15. Moore employs like
most often to construct similes using "like," which Livingston does
rarely, as the numbers demonstrate like ringing a bell. [MacDonald P.] Jackson would
excuse his neglect of would and should and like in chapter 15 by pointing out that would is treated with high frequency words in chapter 16, should and like with medium-high frequency words in chapter 17. But would and should and like
are too useful for differentiating Moore from Livingston to bury in a
statistical table where numbers replace words and effectively mask their
real identity, meaning, and literary value. In fact, these three words
scream, "C.C.M. was here!"
Deal-Breaker # 5: Henry does not do epic or "Homeric" similes. Ever.
All by itself, Deal-Breaker Number Five excludes Henry Livingston, Jr. as a serious candidate and clinches the authorship of "The Night Before Christmas" for Clement C. Moore. Here's a textbook example of Homeric simile from "A Visit from St. Nicholas" aka "The Night Before Christmas."
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky; So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too. --Poems by Clement C. Moore
DEFINITION OF HOMERIC OR EPIC SIMILE
An extended simile elaborated in such detail or at such length as to eclipse temporarily the main action of a narrative work, forming a decorative digression. Usually it compares one complex action (rather than a simple quality or thing) with another: for example, the approach of an army with the onset of storm-clouds. Sometimes called a Homeric simile after its frequent use in Homer 's epic poems, it was also used by Virgil, Milton, and others in their literary epics. --The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
The Homeric simile in "The Night Before Christmas" compares the sudden, upward flight of Santa's reindeer, depicted in high flown, classical language as "coursers," to the movement of dead leaves blown skyward by a violent wind, when there is no place for them to go but up. The complexity of this epic or Homeric simile perceptibly interrupts the excitement and
fast flow of "The Night Before Christmas." We don't expect it in a nursery rhyme. To keep things fast and
light, some newer editions of the Christmas poem actually delete the
whole passage, according to "Neal" in a 2006 post on the Literal-Minded
blog. (Neal also notes the frequent revision of the distinctive
expression "settled our brains" to the more familiar "settled down.")
Singular or plural, the word brain, as pointed out in the melvilliana post Settle your brains,
is another strong Moore marker. For some a stumbling block, the epic
simile likewise supplies "A Visit from St. Nicholas" with one of its
most unusual and distinctive features. So, like it or not, the adept use
of epic simile distinguishes the Christmas poem from ordinary doggerel.
No way around it, the Homeric or epic simile demands attention as a distinguishing feature of
the original "Night Before Christmas." According to all the available evidence, Henry Livingston, Jr. could not have composed an epic simile to save his soul. As shown above, Livingston did not do narrative verse except in fables and a couple of satirical verse-letters, none of which contains any extended simile of any kind.
Clement C. Moore, on the other hand, regularly employed epic similes. The use of this classical device, a curiously precise and distinctive element of "The Night Before Christmas," is
absolutely characteristic of poems by Clement C. Moore. For proof of Moore's facility here, check out two great examples of epic simile from poems collected in his 1844 volume, Poems. The first occurs in Moore's Verses Addressed to a Lady, originally published over the signature of "L." in The Port Folio for June 1, 1805:
The trickling tears which flow'd at night,
Oft hast thou stay'd, till morning light
Dispell'd my little woes. So fly before the sunbeam's power
The remnants of the evening shower
Which wet the early rose. --Moore's To A Lady
Moore's epic simile in "To a Lady" compares the speaker's childhood tears, dried overnight by innocent and restorative sleep, to raindrops on a rose, dried by the morning sun. In "To a Lady" raindrops "fly" like the dry leaves "fly" in "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Raindrops and leaves both fly "before" some overmastering force of nature: the sunbeam, the hurricane.
In the second example, from "Mr. Chilton's Lectures," the structure of the epic simile closely parallels the As this.../So that... form of the same poetic device in "A Visit from St. Nicholas."
For, asa fluid vainly strives to save
A heavier mass from sinking in its wave, So, in the mind made up of trifles light,
All weighty truths, o'erwhelm'd sink out of sight!--Mr. Chilton's Lectures
Given this early evidence of Moore's facility in the use of epic simile, his long narrative poem "A Trip to Saratoga" should be chock full of them--and so it is. Here are five, by no means all he wrote:
1. The mental and emotional excitement generated by travel in a fast-moving carriage is compared to the "foam and bubbles" produced in a goblet by the rapid pouring of wine:
While rapid motion, as the carriage flies
Stirs up new life and spirit in the soul,
Just as the mantling foam and bubbles rise
In generous wine that's dash'd into the bowl;— --A Trip to Saratoga - Part 4
2. More compares lovely young women with a strong moral center to a weighted, self-balancing toy:
They're like the plaything children call a Witch;
Made of a weight attach'd to somewhat light.
Howe'er you twist or twirl it, toss or twitch,
It has a saving power that brings it right. --A Trip to Saratoga - Part 4
3. Underneath cool exteriors, Latin aristocrats burn with angry passion, like volcanoes covered in snow and ice.
Italian counts and Spanish dons, all cold,
Sedate and grave; but let them rouse with ire,
Like snow-clad mountains, they'll be found to hold
The elements that feed volcanic fire. --A Trip to Saratoga - Part 5
4. Varying the smouldering volcano simile, Moore likens the righteous anger of normally calm intellectual types (like himself, no doubt) to sparks produced by flint and steel. Flint in this figure represents the quiet scholars, steel the idiotic arguments that set them off.
Some tranquil minds were made to shine by dint
Of fools' attacks, that waken'd gen'rous ire ;
As steel elicits from the stricken flint
The sudden brilliance of its secret fire.
--A Trip to Saratoga - Part 5
5. Again in "Saratoga," the traveling Mildmays are so happy to be
homeward bound they almost want to delay the return trip--like children
who would prolong their enjoyment of an appetizing treat by only looking
at it.
With such delight our party's minds were fraught,
To think that homeward they were hurl'd again;
Such pleasure 'twas to dwell upon the thought,
They almost wish'd the motion to restrain.
Just as we see a child delay to taste
Some ripe and tempting fruit 'tis wont to prize;
Nor will it to the dainty pleasure haste;
But still puts off the feast, and fondly eyes. --A Trip to Saratoga - Part 6
In To the Sisters of Charity Moore compares souls of saintly nuns to migrating birds "that seek a better clime":
When death draws near, they gladly hail his power.
And then, like birds that seek a better clime,
On swift untiring wing their spirits rise,
And gladly leave this turbid stream of time.
To take their homeward progress through the skies. --The Sisters of Charity
Another and more complicated bird figure appears in Charles Elphinstone. Here, in what strikes me now as the most exhilarating of his many extended similes, Moore imagines the gravely imperiled soul of George Cadwallader as a bird on the Niagara River, being relentlessly swept toward destruction.
But, from the host of heaven a spirit came,
And snatch'd it from his grasp - and George was sav'd!
A bird, thus, floating on a rapid stream,
Whose violence forbids it to take wing,
Just as it rushes o'er the cataract's brow
To meet destruction in the roaring gulph,
Is caught and borne upon the viewless air,
And, circling, wings its joyous flight aloft.*
* This is said to happen with water fowl on the rapids of Niagara [Moore's note].
--Charles Elphinstone (as transcribed by Mary S. Van Deusen and presented on Henry Livingston.com)
Moore's last and best epic simile thus compares the surprising arrival of an angel from heaven to the experience of floating ducks when all of a sudden they find themselves up-borne by air instead of water. Though invisible, "viewless air" is not nothing. It looked like Cosmocrator was going to have poor George in Hell, for sure, but at the last possible moment Moore's angel takes him somewhere better.
Herman Melville himself had to admit, in the Epilogue to Clarel, that even seemingly unreclaimable "stoics" might one day "be astounded into heaven."
Now a century old, the Moore vs. Livingston question seems very like the so-called Shakespeare Authorship Question, where the real experts well know that Will Shakespeare the actor and playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote those great plays and poems attributed to him, not Francis Bacon or Edward De Vere. With due allowance for Shakespeare's undoubted collaboration(s) with other professional playwrights, knowing academics know for a certainty that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, but they generally don't like arguing with authorship nuts. Working scholars understandably regard authorship discussions, interminable and acrimonious, as a depressing waste of time. On the other hand, authorship debates often provide excellent opportunities for learning, as well as comic relief. From the traditional Stratford end of the SAQ, the Oxfraud website and Oxfraud Public Group on Facebook lovingly invite and make the most of opportunities for fun and enlightenment.
SHE SAID/HE SAID DEPT.
According to his wife, Robert Gracey Denig foretold that
"The Night Before Christmas" will ever be a Shakespeare-Bacon sort of affair.
Commodore
Denig's prophecy would seem to represent the best hope Livingston advocates
have left, for perpetuating the lie that Henry Livingston, Jr. wrote "A
Visit from St. Nicholas." Maybe the distinguished naval officer,
engineer, and husband of Livingston descendant Jeannie Livingston Hubbard Denig
was right, although possibly he overestimated the durability of once
alluring arguments for Francis
Bacon as the real author of Shakespeare's works. For a century now, it's
been more of a Shakespeare-Oxford sort of affair. Two 1920 articles favored the false claim for Henry Livingston with unduly generous treatments:
Winthrop P. Tryon, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. Christian Science Monitor, August 4, 1920; and
Henry Litchfield West, "Who Wrote "'Twas The Night Before Christmas"? The Bookman, December 1920.
The revival of the Livingston claim around 1920 coincided with the
publication of J. Thomas Looney's Shakespeare Identified (London, 1920).
Every December since then, stories promoting or at least highlighting
the case for Livingston's authorship of "The Night Before Christmas"
have circulated in popular media. Hereafter, or soon enough, the
100-year-old Oxfordian crusade having played itself out (with a good bit
of help from the knowledgeable and gifted authorship obsessives at
Oxfraud), Commodore Denig's analogy to the SAQ will have to be revamped by designating a
different challenger. We'll need another name in place of Bacon or
Oxford. Fill in the blank:
"The Night Before Christmas" will ever be a Shakespeare-Bacon Shakespeare-Oxford Shakespeare-__________ sort of affair.
"The Night Before Christmas" will ever be a Shakespeare-Sackville sort of affair.
Seasonal Help Wanted. Applications now being accepted.
But surely Major Livingston's time is past, like Edward De Vere's, and
Bacon's before him. If the SCAQ (Santa Claus Authorship Question) must
be always with us, then 21st century contrarians will
need a new and better rival candidate for the authorship of "The Night
Before Christmas." Jonathan Odell, Clement C. Moore's loyalist godfather, ought to be worth a good long look. Rev. Odell was the first Provincial Secretary of New Brunswick, and no mean poet.
Perhaps
Odell’s most powerful satire was “The American times,” which once was
attributed to Dr Myles Cooper and which appeared over the pseudonym
Camillo Querno. Here the poet calls before him those he holds
responsible for the crime of the revolution, namely the fallen angels,
who, able temporarily to leave Pandemonium, take on human form and wreak
havoc in earthly society. For this device Odell may have been indebted
to John Milton. --Dictionary of Canadian Biography
The New Brunswick Museum has a copy of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" in the handwriting of Jonathan Odell's daughter, Mary Odell. Problem there is, Mary also copied out other early poems by Clement C. Moore. Wait, could Mary be THE ONE? Move over, Henry! And don't you fret about the 1824 watermark. That can be explained away later.
Obviously I've been holed up all month trying to map out a case for Herman Melville. Can we add "A Visit from St. Nicholas" to the short list of Santa Claus poems by Herman Melville? Bad news: the hard fact of Melville's August 1, 1819 birthday makes him just four years old when "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was first published in Troy. Written at age 3? Far-fetched, I know, even for a brother of Gansevoort Melville. Come to think of it, the most generous and most truly Melvillean angle here would be, after all this fa-la-la, to ascribe the authorship of "The Night Before Christmas" to "S. B." You know, the "Spirit of all Beauty," since
the names of all fine authors are
fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius,—simply standing, as
they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.-- Hawthorne and His Mosses
Ever-eluding? Did he just say, "ever-eluding"? Now that reminds me of something I read in...
Oh, never mind. How many shopping days do we have left?
Meanwhile, one misses much of the intellectual tragicomedy of Clarel, much of its deceptively quiet play of irony, if one fails to observe how the cheery Derwent, who begins by striking one as a merely fatuous Yea-sayer, grows in grace as the poem proceeds, developing lights and shades of personal quality one had not suspected, inspiring a more and more genuine liking in the very Melvillean Rolfe, and giving expression in his modest and kindly manner to insights that Melville elsewhere expresses as his own. One must attend to both Ungar and Derwent, as well as to some of the others, if one wishes to distinguish all the intonations of Melville’s own voice. --Newton Arvin
