Copy of Christmas classic for sale at auction house https://t.co/H8SUDeYD3V
— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) December 10, 2024
Original research and riffs on Herman Melville, authorship, and nineteenth-century American literature.
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Copy of Christmas classic for sale at auction house
Friday, November 24, 2023
Old Santeclaus
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In A Visit From St. Nicholas, best known as " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas," Clement C. Moore borrowed the reindeer and other details from the illustrated Christmas poem in The Children's Friend Number III, published in New York in 1821 by William B. Gilley.
Old SANTECLAUS with much delight
His reindeer drives this frosty night,
O'er chimney-tops, and tracks of snow,
To bring his yearly gifts to you.
The steady friend of virtuous youth,
The friend of duty, and of truth,
Each Christmas eve he joys to come
Where love and peace have made their home.
Through many houses he has been,
And various beds and stockings seen;
Some, white as snow, and neatly mended,
Others, that seem'd for pigs intended.
To some I gave a pretty doll,
To some a peg-top, or a ball;
No crackers, cannons, squibs, or rockets,
To blow their eyes up, or their pockets.
Where e’er I found good girls or boys,
That hated quarrels, strife and noise,
I left an apple, or a tart,
Or wooden gun, or painted cart.
No drums to stun their Mother’s ear,
Nor swords to make their sisters fear;
But pretty books to store their mind
With knowledge of each various kind.
But where I found the children naughty,
In manners rude, in temper haughty,
Thankless to parents, liars, swearers,
Boxers, or cheats, or base tale-bearers,
I left a long, black, birchen rod,
Such as the dread command of GOD
Directs a Parent’s hand to use
When virtue’s path his sons refuse.
The American Antiquarian Society and Yale University Library /
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library have beautiful, very rare copies. Thankfully great digital images from both are accessible online:
AAS https://gigi.mwa.org/imagearchive/filename/249665_
YALE https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2014510
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Evert A. Duyckinck on Clement C. Moore: "one of the best of men"
In the posthumously published article for Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly (June 1884) titled "Life in New York City in its Later Colonial Days," Herman Melville's friend Evert Duyckinck remembered Clement C. Moore as "one of the best of men" and extensively quoted Moore's "exquisite rhymes" on St. Nicholas:
Besides, has not Weir painted the scene? and has it not been described by one of the best of men in most exquisite rhymes? --Evert A. Duyckinck
There were several national or religious festivals kept by the Dutch in New Amsterdam: Christmas, New Year's Day, Paas or Easter, Pinxter at Whitsuntide, and Santa Claus or St. Nicholas Day. Some of the peculiar Dutch honors of the last have been transferred to Christmas; particularly the visit of St. Nicholas, who, to the wondering children of Manhattan, on the eve of the sacred day, still, as of yore, a burly, benevolent figure, clad in his ancient furry habiliments, a pipe in his month, a capacious, well-filled hamper of toys on his back, rides in his airy sleigh, swiftly borne by his reindeer-team, over the roofs of the houses, descending, spite of narrow flues and modern contracted chimneys, to fill the stockings suspended, in expectation of his gifts, at the mantel-corner. The faith in the old legend of St. Nicholas, patron of the Manhattoes, would, with other superstitions of the past, doubtless have died out long ago were it not invigorated by these perennial gifts and bounties. There is practically no discrediting a belief which is backed by such unfailing beneficence. We, "children of a larger growth," hoodwink our perceptions and act upon it every day in our intercourse with society and estimate of character, feigning to believe in more doubtful virtues than those of the boy-saint. Besides, has not Weir painted the scene? and has it not been described by one of the best of men in most exquisite rhymes?—
"The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of midday to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
* * * *
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
Tho prancing and pawing of each little hoof—
As I drew In my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound,
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow:
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath,
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlfull of jelly." *
* Poems by Clement C. Moore, LL. D: 1844, pp. 125-6
This, is the children's saint of the Manhattoes, fixed in his great lineaments for all time.
-- from Life in New York City in its Later Colonial Days by Evert A. Duyckinck; also incorporated in "The Origin of the New York Churches," Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine (March 1886).In their 1855 Cyclopædia of American Literature, co-editors Evert A. Duyckinck and his brother George L. Duyckinck had accorded Moore a similarly generous treatment, likewise informed by some personal knowledge of the man being described:
Professor Moore has lightened his learned labors in the seminary by the composition of numerous poems from time to time, chiefly expressions of home thoughts and affections, with a turn for humor as well as sentiment, the reflections of a genial, amiable nature. They were collected by the author in a volume in 1844, which be dedicated to his children. Though occasional compositions they are polished in style....Even more expansively, the updated National Cyclopedia of American Biography praises the same admirable traits of character in Clement C. Moore:
--Cyclopædia of American Literature
He was a man of rare beauty and simplicity of character, kindly disposed and generous to a fault. Upon his death, the faculty of the seminary he had so faithfully served passed resolutions declaring, "We recognize in him one whom God has blessed with selected gifts; warmhearted in friendship, genial in society, kindly and considerate to all; possessed of fine literary tastes, poetic instincts and expressiveness, and of cheerful humor withal; at the same time well accomplished in severer studies and resolute for more laborious undertakings, as his learned works in Hebrew grammar and lexicography distinctly testify."From the New York Sun, May 16, 1886:
... Lady Lilford, formerly Miss Theresa Moore, the daughter of the late Clement C. Moore, who will be remembered by all old New Yorkers as one of the most estimable, genial, and popular men of his day. He wrote the Christmas poem familiar in every nursery and school room, beginning, "'Twas the night before Christmas," and was well known in both the literary and the social world.
Related posts:
- Melville's Santa Claus
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/12/melvilles-santa-claus.html
- Dr. Francis and Clement C. Moore
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/11/dr-francis-and-clement-c-moore.html
- Samuel Turner's 1850 dedication
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/02/samuel-h-turners-1850-dedication-to.html
- Evert Duyckinck on Christmastime festivities in Manhattan https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/12/evert-duyckinck-on-christmastime.html
Friday, February 10, 2017
Happy Christmas; or, don't get me started on Dunder and Blixem
...the then extremely rare “Happy Christmas” rather than “Merry Christmas”
--Response by MacDonald P. Jackson
 |
| Letters from John Pintard to His Daughter Volume 2 (New York, 1940), page 114 |
happy Christmas, and a merry New Year, your Cellars full of Money, and your Pockets full of Beer....The regular choice of "happy" over "merry" in many texts by clergymen and other pious writers is neatly explained below, in the 1752 letter to his wife by John Newton (published in 1810). While still active in the African slave trade (twenty years before he composed the words to "Amazing Grace"), Newton distinguishes mirth and happiness, in his mind "two very different things." Our Anglican moralists seem to prefer "happy" over "merry" because for them, "merry" implies inebriation. A happy Christmas, as opposed to a merry one, means a sober Christmas. Clergymen and missionaries in particular do not want to encourage holiday drunkenness and debauchery, or anything like the carnival rites that Clement C. Moore (as brilliantly demonstrated by Stephen Nissenbaum in The Battle for Christmas) aimed to tame in "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Say now. Perhaps with Santa's parting "Happy Christmas to all," Moore the sturdy Episcopalian and inveterate moralizer has managed to slip a little didactic pill in with the sugar-plums, when we weren't looking.
Plenty more where these came from. Perhaps I will expand the inventory, further on up the road....
1676
"I Send You this to express my hearty Wishes, That You may enjoy a Happy Christmass and New-Year." --George Wheeler, An account of the churches, or places of assembly, of the primitive Christians
MY wishes to your lad[yshi]p] and Community, are of a most happy Christmasse... I present you with The voice of Truth, the Angel of peace who giving himself unto us, gave us the first happy Christ-masse.... --F. G., The voyce of truth or The high way leading to true peace composed in Latine by M.G. and translated into Inglish by F.G.1679
Durham Dec. 23 1679.1684
"... wishing you a happy Christmas and new yeare...."
--Reverend Denis Grenville, archbishop of York to John Locke via Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence.
"it hath been no holy nor happy Christmass, if it hath not prevailed with us to resolve to be better men...." --Denis Grenville, The compleat conformist, or, Seasonable advice concerning strict conformity1687
Merry song fit to be sung at Christmas. The Tune, Oh Mother Roger.
1693Now, now this happy Christmas Season,
I present you with Delight;
[...]nce it is no more than Reason,
For to pass away each Night....--Chaucer, Junior - Canterbury Tales
"O the happy Christmas this will prove to us, in case we can but resolve to practice Humility and Charity!" --La Mothe, Two discourses concerning the divinity of Our Saviour
1700
Letter from William Milman to Thomas Waller dated 27 December 1700:
... wishing you, and all my Tenants, a happy Christmas, and merry New Year, and expecting to year from you: And am1707
Your Friend at Command,Inner Temple,
Wm. Milman.
27 December 1700. --Journals of the House of Commons v. 13 1699-1702, page 404.
With respects to Mr. Benson and all at Salisbury-court; wishing your Lordship and them an happy Christmas, and many good New Years.... --Letter "From Mr. Joseph Nicolson" dated December 22, 1707 in Letters on Various Subjects (London, 1809), volume 2 page 338.
"I wish you a happy Christmas and New Year."1712
--Mrs. Frances Shaftoe's Narrative
26th. I was to wish the duke of Ormond a happy Christmas, and give half a crown to his porter. It will cost me a dozen half crowns among such fellows. --Letters, written by Jonathan Swift1738
Hugh Boulter, Lord Primate of All Ireland "To Mrs. Wall," 19 December 1738:
... My service with my spouse's to you and your family, wishing you all a happy Christmas,
I am, Madam, &c. --Letters Written by His Excellency Hugh Boulter, D. D. (Dublin, 1770), volume 1 page 198.1749
"Please permit me to wish all your senatorical Rank, happy Christmas, and a merry New Year, your Cellars full of Money, and your Pockets full of Beer a l' Irelandoite." --Machiavel's Letter to the Lords and CommonsJanuary 3, 1750
"Most people would think it too late, to wish you a happy Christmas." --Original Letters of the Rev. James Hervey; also in Herveiana (London, 1823)1771
I hope you have had a happy Christmas at Leeds. We have kept holidays here indeed. --Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, M. A. Vol. 2 (London, 1771)1773
Dar as boas festas a alguem, to wish a happy Christmas, or Easter to one, to wish one the compliments of the season. --Anthony Vieyra, A Dictionary of the Portuguese and English Languages (London, 1773).1799
"To conclude: Do your duty to God and men; enjoy the company of your friends and neighbors; eat and drink with strict temperance and sobriety; and then you will not fail to have, what I heartily wish you, a COMFORTABLE AND AN HAPPY CHRISTMAS." --Admonitions for Sunday-Schools (London, 1799)
Carlisle, Dec. 25.
The Editor of the Carlisle Gazette presents his readers with the compliments of the season A HAPPY CHRISTMAS -- and at the same time condoles with them at the late melancholy news, the death of Lieutenant General GEORGE WASHINGTON....
-- Kline's Carlisle Weekly Gazette (Carlisle, Pennsylvania) December 25, 1799
1800
1820
"[we] are coming down to the vicarage to keep the Christmas:--and a happy Christmas 'tis likely to be for honest folks: as for they that are not honest, it is not for them to expect to be happy, at Christmas or any other time." --Maria Edgeworth, The Parent's Assistant 3rd edition (London, 1800)1807
An Advent spent in a devout and penitential manner, cannot fail of conducting thee to a happy Christmas. --Richard Challoner, Meditations or Considerations upon Christian Truths and Duties1808
"One happy Christmas laid upon the shelf " --Poem "A Chapter on Logic." Collected in The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1808; and frequently reprinted, for example in the Philadelphia Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor, May 1, 1810; and the Cortland Village Museum, October 9, 18201809
"... we were looking forward to a happy Christmas time last December, when one of them said, ' Will anybody think of the little sick children at the Union ?' "--Emma Sheppard, Sunshine in the Workhouse1810
I wish you, my dear friend, a very happy Christmas; may the blessed Jesus himself "bring you good tidings of great joy!" --George Russell, Letters, Essays and Poems on Religious Subjects
"I NOW sit down to wish you a happy Christmas; a merry one, is a frequent phrase, but that falls far short of my desire. For I have often found mirth and happiness to be two very different things... --Works of the Rev. John Newton1811
Here, and in the neighbouring villages, I spent my Christmas, and a happy Christmas too. --"Mode of celebrating Christmas in Yorkshire" in The Gentleman's Magazine
"After spending a very happy Christmas with his family, he set off again for Charlestown [South Carolina], where he arrived January 3, 1741; and on the 16th, went on board for England. --Memoirs of the Life and Character of the Late Rev. George Whitefield
Saturday 25, we had a happy Christmas-day. --Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine1813
"I wish you both a happy christmas, and that your holidays, may be days of the Son of man...." Methodist preacher William Huntington in Gleanings of the Vintage1815
a drunkard who, to the great joy of his wife and family, is reformed, having learned how much his temporal comfort is improved by his new habits, consoles himself by anticipating the superior happiness he shall enjoy this Christmas, compared to the riot and intoxication of the last festival season.... this will be the best way of enjoying a happy Christmas. --Thomas Pole, A History of the Origin and Progress of Adult Schools
1820
"You have now, my dear children," continued he, "enjoyed a merry and a happy Christmas, have you not?" --The Welcome Visitor, or, The Good Uncle1821
NEW YORK, 26 Decembr, 18211822
A Happy Christmas to our dearest daughter, her good husband and large family of children, was the health drunk yesterday by your parents and Sister at their tranquil board. . . . --Letters from John Pintard to His Daughter, Volume 2
Never did I spend a more happy Christmas. --Missionary Register, January 1, 1822
"Christmas. To us this has been a happy Christmas, by the arrival of letters from America...." --Religious Intelligencer, July 6, 1822
"... here I found a letter from home, wishing me a happy Christmas." --Thomas Rees, A Journal of Voyages and Travels1823
Be diligent the other 'leven,
And this month may to joy be given--
To christian acts--your Maker's praise--
And happy CHRISTMAS holidays.
J. E. --The Georgia and South-Carolina Almanack for 1823
"I hope you have spent a happy Christmas." --Christian Repository, January 31, 18231824
"We have celebrated a very happy Christmas and entrance into the New Year." --Hans Peter Hallbeck, United Brethren's Missionary Intelligencer, 4th Qtr 1824
"We return the compliment of a happy Christmas to the writer." --London Courier and Evening Gazette, December 27, 18241825
"Wishing our numerous friends, a cheerful and happy Christmas...." --The Lady's Monthly Museum
... wishing our fair readers, from our hearts, a very merry and happy Christmas, with the simplicity which always accompanies truth. --New York Mirror, December 24, 18251826
CHRISTMAS BOX DAY. / The Watchmen's Petition
...
Thus, whether Male or Female, Old or Young,
Or Wed or Single, be this burden sung:
Long may you live to hear, and we to call,
"A Happy Christmas, and New Year to all!"--Kentish Weekly Post or Canterbury Journal, December 26, 1826
"It will be a happy Christmas for me, if I learn to think more about Jesus Christ..." --The Child's Companion or Sunday Scholar's Reward, December 1, 18261827
"We exclaim'd, "O, tell me, is it
Long to happy CHRISTMAS-DAY? --Christmas and the New Year (London, 1827)
The Holidays.--The season of presents, cakes, and hilarity, has arrived again, and we issue this number in the very midst of it. The throngs of happy children that we encounter in the streets, whose little smiling faces look almost blue with the cold, but whom wind and weather cannot restrain from sallying out, to spend their holiday finances in the nearest toyshop; the greeting of "a happy Christmas to you," that salutes our ears, into whatever house we step, and for saying which the urchins expect a return--but not in kind; and the peculiar nature of the amusements and sports around the evening fireside, where a sort of moral sunshine diffuses itself, bright in proportion to the bleak and disagreeable state of external nature, all are but so many evidences of the undecaying spirit with which this festival spirit of the year is still observed.1828
--The New York Mirror, December 29, 1827
The season is near at hand, when the silver voices of the merry and gay-hearted little urchins will be heard in the usual greeting "a happy Christmas to you!" and what a delightful sensation it must afford a benevolent heart thus addressed, to return the salutation with a Christmas Box, or a Casket, such as we have just been rifling for the entertainment of our readers. --The Critic, December 13, 18281829
"A HAPPY Christmas and a merry new year!" How many million times will this good natured salutation be interchanged, wherever the English language is spoken….1829?
--New York Mirror, December 26, 1829
A NEW CAROL TO THE TUNE OF "God rest ye, Merry Gentlemen."1830
Now may the ruler of this house,
These great glad tidings know;
And many a happy Christmas
May he have here below;
And to his friends and kindred,
The Saviour's mercy show;
Glad tidings of comfort and joy. --Broadside printed in London by A. Applegate and E. Cowper; in 1810-1840 Radical Politics and the Working Man in England Set 41. British Library.
"And wishing Happy Christmas all, beg leave to make my bow, Sir.1832
Bow, wow, &c."
--"Marvellous Times / A Christmas Carol for the year 1830"; in the Chester Chronicle and Cheshire and North Wales General Advertiser, December 31, 1830.
"A happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to all our Readers! "Related post:
--Bury and Norwich Post, December 26, 1832
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Melville's Santa Claus
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| Drawing by F. O. C. Darley via Library of Congress |
... a wightVerbal echoes of Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas aka "'The Night Before Christmas" in Melville's "Stockings" poem begin in the title with the stockings and chimney. The children are there, of course, only now they have names. (Two boys and two girls, same number and gender as the children Herman and Lizzie had when they lived in Pittsfield, on the farm called "Arrowhead.") Like the children in Moore's poem, Melville's wait "in hope." Moore said "In hopes," and Melville says "in hope" twice, managing through repetition to make them plural.
More than mortal, with something of man,
Whisking about, an invisible spright,
Almoner blest of Oberon's clan. --Stockings in the Farm-house Chimney
Melville's Santa gets his sleigh from Moore's St. Nick. And his elvish features, too, borrowed from Moore and amplified by Melville. That habit of "Whisking about" displayed by Melville's Santa imitates the "lively and quick" manner of Moore's St. Nick. Moore's Santa may be "chubby and plump" but he never waddles or dawdles. When Santa moves, he springs. Or flies. And Melville's Santa arrives in triple anapests (the delight / to believe / in a wight), the metrical dress of Moore's Santa.
Melville's invocation of Oberon makes explicit the implied associations in Moore's poem between Santa Claus and the fairy world, particularly as represented by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and by Michael Drayton in Nymphidia. Drayton's fairy mythology surely influenced the naming of Santa's Reindeer. Associations with Oberon's fairy kingdom are unmistakable by the end of Moore's "Visit," when Santa flies up and away like the down of a thistle--just the stuff that cushions Queen Mab's chariot:
With thistle-down they shod it:Please don't make me explicate the last stanza of Melville's "Stockings in the Farm-house Chimney." It's Christmas Eve!
For all her maidens much did fear,
If OBERON had chanc'd to hear,
That MAB his queen should have been there,
He would not have abode it. --Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy
Alright, after the kids fall asleep (hahahaha) maybe I'll whisper something like this: when Melville or his appointed speaker says "Stay, Truth, O stay," he or she really means it. Now turn off The Simpsons and go to bed or Santa will never get here.
 |
| Drawing by F. O. C. Darley via Library of Congress |
As mentioned in a previous melvilliana post, the drawings for the 1862 illustrated edition of Clement C. Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas are by Herman Melville's friend Felix Darley. Melville's Christmas Eve poem "Stockings" draws from one or another version of that delightful "Visit." Melville's other Santa poem, next as it should be in Weeds and Wildings, celebrates Christmas Day. "A Dutch Christmas Up the Hudson in the Time of Patroons," looks back to Moore's own source-text in The History of New York by Washington Irving, properly regarded as the genius of invented traditions. For historical background that illuminates Melville's "Dutch Christmas" poem like the Griswold Family Christmas Tree, get The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum. Historian Charles W. Jones made the essential point about the importance of Irving in his entertaining 1954 essay, available online via the St Nicholas Center:Stockings in the Farm-house Chimney
Happy, believe, this Christmas Eve
Are Willie and Rob and Nellie and May—
Happy in hope! in hope to receive
These stockings well stuffed from Santa Claus' sleigh.
O the delight to believe in a wight
More than mortal, with something of man,
Whisking about, an invisible spright,
Almoner blest of Oberon's clan.
Stay, Truth, O stay in a long delay!
Why should these little ones find you out?
Let them forever with fable play,
Evermore hang the Stocking out! --Herman Melville
Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus. The History contains no less than twenty-five allusions to him—many of them the most delightful flights of imagination in the volume. Here is the source of the legends about St. Nicholas in New Amsterdam—of the emigrant ship Goede Vrouw, like a Dutch matron as broad as she was long, with a figurehead of St. Nicholas at the prow. Here are the descriptions of festivities on St. Nicholas Day in the colony, and of the church dedicated to him. Here is the description of Santa Claus bringing gifts, parking his horse and wagon on the roof while he slides down the chimney.And Patrick Browne summarizes Jones and reconsiders the Irving connection in his thoughtful St. Nicholas Day post of a few years back, Santa Claus was Made by Washington Irving.
--Charles W. Jones on the Knickerbocker Santa Claus
Here's a pertinent sample of Irving's style and substance there:
The good old Dutch festivals, those periodical demonstrations of an overflowing heart and a thankful spirit, which are falling into sad disuse among my fellow-citizens, were faithfully observed in the mansion of Governor Stuyvesant. New year was truly a day of open-handed liberality, of jocund revelry, and warm-hearted congratulation—when the bosom seemed to swell with genial goodfellowship; and the plenteous table was attended with an unceremonious freedom, and honest broad-mouthed merriment, unknown in these days of degeneracy and refinement. Paas and Pinxter were scrupulously observed throughout his dominions; nor was the day of St. Nicholas suffered to pass by without making presents, hanging the stocking in the chimney, and complying with all its other ceremonies. --History of New YorkBeing well versed in his Irving, Melville knows and uses details from various works, most obviously the successive Christmas chapters that begin the second volume of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. In 1876 these were combined in a separate volume titled Old Christmas, lavishly illustrated by Randolph Caldecott. So the hospitality of Melville's "Dutch Christmas" strongly resembles English hospitality as Irving imagined it at Bracebridge Hall. Melville fuses holiday trappings there, like indoor evergreens, roasted apples, turkey and ale, with situations and characters from elsewhere. The mistletoe "bush" that will lure "our Hans and Cousin Chris" after the dance is a notable enticement of Irving's chapter on Christmas Eve. As Irving explains in his footnote on "misletoe":
The misletoe is still hung up in farm houses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases. --Christmas EveKatrina, however, seems lifted from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," as Robert Ryan points out in the notes to his 1967 edition.
In the service of Melville's speaker (some prosperous Dutch farmer, if not the noble old Patroon himself) Santa rides out with mince-pie and pudding for all the prisoners in town (turns out there's only one), and for less fortunate neighbors or dependents. Not poor, we're told, and too proud to accept any gift condescendingly bestowed as charity. Melville's final line affirms the ideal of charity, or love, with a clear conscience. Possibly the poet has been reading in the Epistles of St. Paul:
"Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned. --1 Timothy 1:5Considering the day (Christmas) and place (barn or stable), Melville comes close to homilizing on the Nativity with reflections on "the ox, ass, and Babe new-born." Melville we know read and commended Montalembert's Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Did Melville's reading of French Catholics in translation include Prosper Guéranger on The Liturgical Year? Guéranger's paraphrase of Rabanus Maurus similarly links Christmas and conscience, alongside the appropriate references to ox, ass, and Babe in that order:
the pious Rabanus Maurus—who, in a Homily on the Nativity of our Lord, encourages sinners to come and take their place, side by side with the just, in the stable of Bethlehem, where even the ox and the ass recognise their Master in the Babe who lies there.The most distinctively Melvillean touch in "Dutch Christmas" might be the speaker's concern for the well-being of other animals (excepting I guess the poor turkey) as his fellow creatures. Horses get extra oats, cows their favorite hay, birds the best crumbs. When Herman Melville lived at Arrowhead, he liked to watch his cow at breakfast, eating her pumpkins:
"I beseech you, dearly beloved Brethren, that you receive with fervent hearts the words our Lord speaks to you, through me, on this most sweet Feast, on which even infidels and sinners are touched with compunction; on which the wicked man is moved to mercy, the contrite heart hopes for pardon, the exile despairs not of returning to his country, and the sick man longs for his cure; on which is born the Lamb who taketh away the sins of the world, that is, Christ, our Saviour. On such a Birth Day, he that has a good conscience, rejoices more than usual; and he whose conscience is guilty, fears with a more useful fear...." --The Liturgical Year: Christmas
"for it's a pleasant sight to see a cow move her jaws—she does it so mildly & with such a sanctity." --Some Personal Letters of Herman MelvilleFor the farmer-speaker of Melville's "Dutch Christmas," the fittingest place to go on Christmas morning is the barn, to visit the cows and take in "their sweet breath."
A Dutch Christmas Up the Hudson in the Time of Patroons
Over the ruddy hearth, lo, the green bough!
In house of the sickle and home of the plough,
Arbored sit and toast apples now!
Hi, there in barn! have done with the flail.
Worry not the wheat, nor winnow in the gale:
'Tis Christmas and holiday, turkey too and ale!
Creeping round the wainscot of old oak red,
The ground-pine, see — smell the sweet balsam shed!
Leave off, Katrina, to tarry there and scan:
The cream will take its time, girl, to rise in the pan.
Meanwhile here’s a knocking, and the caller it is Van —
Tuenis Van der Blumacher, your merry Christmas man.
Leafless the grove now where birds billed the kiss:
To-night when the fidler wipes his forehead, I wis,
And panting from the dance come our Hans and Cousin Chris,
Yon bush in the window will never be amiss!
But oats have ye heaped, men, for horses in stall?
And for each heifer young and the old mother-cow
Have ye raked down the hay from the aftermath-mow?
The Christmas let come to the creatures one and all!
Though the pedlar, peering in, doubtless deemed it but folly,
The yoke-cattle’s horns did I twine with green holly.
Good to breathe their sweet breath this blest Christmas morn,
Mindful of the ox, ass, and Babe new-born.
The snow drifts and drifts, and the frost it benumbs:
Elsie, pet, scatter to the snow-birds your crumbs.
Sleigh-bells a’ jingle! ’Tis Santa Claus: hail!
Villageward he goes thro’ the spooming of the snows;
Yea, hurrying to round his many errands to a close,
A mince-pie he’s taking to the one man in jail. —
What! drove right out between the gate-posts here?
Well, well, little Sharp-Eyes, blurred panes we must clear!
Our Santa Claus a clever way has and a free:
Gifts from him some will take who would never take from me.
For poor hereabouts there are none: — none so poor
But that pudding for an alms they would spurn from the door.
All the same to all in the world’s wide ways—Melville put his two Santa Claus poems in the collection of poetry and prose titled "Weeds and Wildings." The great Houghton Library, Harvard University has the manuscript of Weeds and Wildings in their Herman Melville papers. In a wonderful present to Melville readers the world over, manuscript pages with Santa Claus poems in late stages of drafting are digitized and available online:
Happy harvest of the conscience on many Christmas Days. --Herman Melville
- Melville's Stockings - manuscript at Houghton Library, Harvard
- Melville's Dutch Christmas - manuscript at Houghton Library, Harvard
- The Works of Herman Melville, volume 16 - the Constable edition published in London, 1924
- Collected Poems, edited by Howard Vincent - the 1947 Hendricks House edition
- Weeds and Wildings - the 1967 PhD dissertation by Robert Charles Ryan
Happy Christmas to all, and don't forget: What happens under the mistletoe stays under the mistletoe.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Settle your brains, Clement C. Moore wrote "The Night Before Christmas"
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| via Library of Congress |
And Mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,Clement C. Moore liked the word brain so much he used it twenty times in his poetry, not counting "settled our brains" in A Visit from St. Nicholas, aka "The Night Before Christmas." Henry Livingston maybe speaks of "brains" one time only, in one poem that he might or might not have written: Filly and Wolf, where the wolf got its brains kicked out by the clever and spirited filly.
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap.... --A Visit from St Nicholas
CLEMENT C. MOORE
- Confounds my brain, and nearly splits my head. --A Trip to Saratoga
- And raise a tumult in the coolest brains. --A Trip to Saratoga
- Her brain, of borrow'd thoughts a mingled mass --A Trip to Saratoga
- As dreams which haunt the feverish brain --Translation - Chorus from Prometheus
- Some thoughts, the ravelings of my brain --Lines for a Fragment Fair
- Of countless joys, rush wildly through my brain -- Lines to the Fashionable, From a Veteran Belle
- Like many which puzzle deep reasoners' brains --The Pig and the Rooster
- E'er rack your joints or cloud your brain; --The Water Drinker
- No vertigos your brain perplex --The Water Drinker
- Oh! child of frolic, in whose giddy brain --The Sisters of Charity
- This faithless prospect of a dreaming brain --To Southey
- But oh! these spectres that infest my brain! --To Southey
- “But, sure, thro' my brain how your image kept jaunting!” --Irish Valentine
- And glaring lights, the sight and brain confound. --Newport Beach
- "Of late, good aunt, I have perplexed my brain" --Charles Elphinstone
- And cool'd the fever that had touch'd his brain. --Charles Elphinstone
- That swell'd his brain and flutter'd in his breast. --Charles Elphinstone
- Produced such wild delirium in his brain, --Charles Elphinstone
- Engender'd in a loving maiden's brain; --Charles Elphinstone
- Nor was this wish mere fancy of the brain; --Charles Elphinstone
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snowIf you want to try this at home, here are links to searchable texts that Mary S. Van Deusen provides on the aforementioned Livingston site:
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below... --A Visit from St. Nicholas
The noun merry-make occurs once, perhaps adjectivally, in the 1819 Carrier's Address published over the signature of young Frederick T. Parsons (1803-1842) and ascribed by family members to Henry Livingston. Otherwise, in verse Livingston never employs merry, the adjective that describes Santa's dimples. Moore does, at least six times. And only Moore calls anything "lively." In the jesting vein of The Pig and the Rooster, the two talking animals are (like St. Nick) "so lively." Only Moore says "lustre." Two times (not counting "the lustre of mid-day" in "Visit") if you include "The constant lustre of the day" in the manuscript poem "Biography of the Heart of Clement C. Moore." By contrast, words and rhymes in "The Night Before Christmas" that Henry Livingston uses but that do not appear in other poems by Clement C. Moore are either coincidental and fairly isolated, like forms of the word hurricane; or strictly commonplace, like the house/mouse and jelly/belly rhymes.
Even the much stronger verbal parallels like brains, visions and dread don't prove authorship, necessarily, but in this case Moore's authorship is already established by strong historical and biographical evidence. Editor Orville L. Holley learned who wrote "A Visit from St Nicholas" only months after it first appeared in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823. The New-York Book of Poetry in 1837 confirmed what the literati already knew. Any lingering doubt was settled when Clement C. Moore included A Visit from St Nicholas without fanfare in his 1844 Poems, where any contribution by another person was identified as such and duly credited, clearly and unambiguously. Extant manuscripts in Moore's handwriting likewise confirm his modest claim.
Links to more facts and reasons in support of Moore's authorship:
- Nancy H. Marshall - Nineteenth Century Publication Milestones
- Common-place: There Arose Such a Clatter - Stephen Nissenbaum
http://commonplace.online/article/there-arose-such-a-clatter/
- Biography of Clement Clarke Moore by Samuel White Patterson, courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library
Then there's this, the published letter from Clement C. Moore to his friend Charles King, editor of the New York American. In this letter Moore plainly and directly claims authorship of the Christmas poem, although he doubts its "intrinsic value." In other words, Moore does not think the poem we know today as "The Night Before Christmas" is all that good, but he owns up to it, anyhow. Moore wrote the letter on February 27, 1844 after a false claim for authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" had appeared in the Washington National Intelligencer.
... The above is printed immediately over some lines, describing a visit from St. Nicholas, which I wrote many years ago, I think somewhere between 1823 and 1824, not for publication, but to amuse my children. They, however, found their way, to my great surprise, in the Troy Sentinel: nor did I know, until lately, how they got there. When "The New York Book" was about to be published, I was applied to for some contribution to the work. Accordingly, I gave the publisher several pieces, among which was the "Visit from St. Nicholas." It was printed under my name, and has frequently since been republished, in your paper among others, with my name attached.
Under these circumstances, I feel it incumbent on me not to remain silent, while so bold a claim, as the above quoted, is laid to my literary property, however small the intrinsic value of that property may be.
The New York Book was published in 1827 [1837].
Yours, truly and respectfully,
CLEMENT C. MOORE
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| New York American - March 1, 1844 |
- Clement C. Moore's Prometheus
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/02/clement-c-moores-prometheus-in-port.html
- Computer error, please try again
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/11/computer-error-please-try-again.html - Response by MacDonald P. Jackson
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/02/response-by-macdonald-p-jackson.html
- Recommended fixes
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/02/recommended-fixes-for-macdonald-p.html
- Jackson on Norsworthy on The Night Before Christmas
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/03/jackson-on-norsworthy-on-night-before.html
- Cadillacs and ragged Fords
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/03/cadillacs-and-ragged-fords.html
- Dunder-Donder, Blixem-Blixen, etc.
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/03/dunder-donder-blixem-blixen-dunder.html
- Eight great favorite expressions of Clement C. Moore
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/04/eight-great-favorite-expressions-of.html
- How we know Clement C. Moore wrote The Night Before Christmas
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-we-know-that-clement-c-moore-wrote.html
- Livingston cousin T. W. C. Moore
http://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2018/12/livingston-cousin-t-w-c-moore.html
- First printing of A Visit from St Nicholas
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/04/first-printing-of-visit-from-st-nicholas.html
Monday, November 7, 2016
Computer error, please try again: MacDonald P. Jackson on the authorship of "The Night Before Christmas"
First off, a little Christmas music to get in the right spirit. Here's Aaron Neville, right on time with our theme song...
When out on the driveway I heard such a clatter,
I dimmed all the lights and turned on Clyde McPhatter.
Now that we have the lights down, a confession: besides being continually engrossed in 19th century studies and the writings of Herman Melville, I'm obsessed with all kinds of authorship mysteries. Truth is, MacDonald P. Jackson had me at “Who.” Yes I pre-ordered his monograph on the disputed authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas," aka “The Night Before Christmas.” Full title: Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"? Analyzing the Clement Clarke Moore vs. Henry Livingston Question. Bought it in Kindle and Paperback. Lamentably, this particular case finds Professor Jackson way off his Shakespeare square. Even so, I hope his method will succeed in getting the writers right, after a needed overhaul. For my own warped ends (public knowledge via my other blog Dragooned), I'm ridiculously glad to allow plenty of theoretical room for the merits of using internal textual evidence to establish authorship. With better analytics, maybe function words and phonemes will prove useful outside of early modern drama. If so, by all means let's crunch the numbers 'til Christmas!
The trouble here is that so much external evidence supports the traditional attribution of “The Night Before Christmas” to Clement C. Moore. Professor Jackson grants as he must the prima facie case for Moore yet proceeds as if none of it matters. At their worst, some of his claims for the import of stylistic evidence and certain external facts (Livingston family letters and oral tradition, reindeer names and other aspects of revision history, poems by Moore in manuscript) amount to special pleading of the kind Mac Jackson, Shakespeare expert rightly abhors in strained, counter-factual arguments for the Earl of Oxford as the true author of Shakespeare’s works. The awkwardest contortions occur in chapter 3, minimizing likely textual corruptions in the first, unauthorized newspaper printing; chapter 4, denying the clear and direct influence of Washington Irving's portrait of St. Nicholas in the 1812 and later editions of A History of New York; and chapter 21, trivializing the important early association of "The Night Before Christmas" with the family of Moore's godfather Jonathan Odell. Jonathan's daughter Mary Odell copied out "A Visit from St. Nicholas" which has survived with other poems by Moore and a couple of his letters among the Odell papers at the New Brunswick Museum Archives.
About Jonathan Odell, even Moore's biographer Samuel W. Patterson erred when he supposed, "The Moores do not appear to have kept up his acquaintance." The next piece of documentary evidence is always out there, somewhere. Joy of discovery awaits, and it would be a shame to explain away the import of a great find.
The trouble here is that so much external evidence supports the traditional attribution of “The Night Before Christmas” to Clement C. Moore. Professor Jackson grants as he must the prima facie case for Moore yet proceeds as if none of it matters. At their worst, some of his claims for the import of stylistic evidence and certain external facts (Livingston family letters and oral tradition, reindeer names and other aspects of revision history, poems by Moore in manuscript) amount to special pleading of the kind Mac Jackson, Shakespeare expert rightly abhors in strained, counter-factual arguments for the Earl of Oxford as the true author of Shakespeare’s works. The awkwardest contortions occur in chapter 3, minimizing likely textual corruptions in the first, unauthorized newspaper printing; chapter 4, denying the clear and direct influence of Washington Irving's portrait of St. Nicholas in the 1812 and later editions of A History of New York; and chapter 21, trivializing the important early association of "The Night Before Christmas" with the family of Moore's godfather Jonathan Odell. Jonathan's daughter Mary Odell copied out "A Visit from St. Nicholas" which has survived with other poems by Moore and a couple of his letters among the Odell papers at the New Brunswick Museum Archives.
About Jonathan Odell, even Moore's biographer Samuel W. Patterson erred when he supposed, "The Moores do not appear to have kept up his acquaintance." The next piece of documentary evidence is always out there, somewhere. Joy of discovery awaits, and it would be a shame to explain away the import of a great find.
"By the way, opening the files in a research institution is much like reaching into a sock on Christmas morning, you never can be certain as to the goodies that could be found." --Ruby CusackSolutions to authorship mysteries are most satisfying when there’s a real mystery to solve, and when style evidence fits with biographical and historical evidence. For historical background, The Battle for Christmas (Random House, 1996) is indispensable. There Stephen Nissenbaum offers a superb reading of "The Night Before Christmas" which underscores the class tensions and unruly carnival rites historically evoked in celebrations of Christmas and New Year's Day. As Professor Nissenbaum shows, Moore's poem helped domesticate Christmas.
In his fine online essay at Common-place, Professor Nissenbaum specifically addresses authorship issues raised by Don Foster in Author Unknown (Henry Holt and Co., 2000) effectively rebutting Professor Foster's negative portrayal of Moore and helpfully reading "The Night Before Christmas," too.
Stylometry alone rarely (never?) settles authorship questions anyway. But it’s fun to keep trying. Hopefully we’ll learn from our mistakes as we go.
All things being equal (which they're not), Professor Jackson's mission would be a fine one, prompted by the noble scholarly motive of giving credit where it’s due. Employing expertise in what he calls “computational stylistics,” he aims to determine who most likely wrote the world-beloved poem “The Night Before Christmas.” Basically Professor Jackson picks up where Don Foster left off and decides, after a grueling set of mathematical exercises, that Henry Livingston, Jr. probably wrote the best Christmas poem ever, not Clement C. Moore as traditionally supposed.
What we've got here is an entertaining and potentially instructive non-problem. On the positive side, how wonderful to learn about Henry Livingston, discover and enjoy his witty verse, and ponder the odds. And three cheers for anything that inspires people to re-read Moore and begin to appreciate his life and other works. By my calculations, the real probability that Clement C. Moore wrote “The Night Before Christmas” is still right around 102%, give or take a couple of percentage points. Fortunately, however, Professor Jackson has the scruples of a first-rate scholar. He makes his errant way so earnestly that it’s easy to spot the wrong turns. Here they are:
Nothing at all against Henry Livingston, but his poems aren’t nearly so mellifluous and magical as Professor Jackson thinks, and Moore’s aren't so bad. Even though Livingston lived decades into the nineteenth century, his poetic sensibility (viewable at the fabulous Henry Livingston website) remained strictly and statically 18th century. The American revolution molded Livingston into a fine patriot, family man and farmer-poet, but I’m here to tell you the Romantic revolution in literature missed him in Poughkeepsie. In that regard, Livingston is like Dylan had Dylan stayed a folkie and never plugged in with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Not that Moore ever went all-Byron or Coleridge on us. Clement C. Moore shares with Livingston the usual neo-classical models like Pope, Dryden and Swift, but some of Moore’s later verse gets electrified by the subjective, emotional intensity of Southey and so-called pre-romantics or transitional poets like William Cowper and Oliver Goldsmith. Livingston values classical forms, artifice, reason and rationality, and displays of wit—hence his fondness for rebuses, acrostics, and verse paraphrases from Aesop and the Bible. And burlesques, social and political. Professor Jackson means to dismiss Moore as a “moralist” and “satirist” but see here now, those labels equally apply to Livingston who lectures his sister Joanna to count her blessings and “Meekly attend the ways of higher heav'n!” On her birthday! It’s the latent Romantic in Moore who will express people’s feelings with a degree of emotional intensity, a subjective directness you might find in Livingston’s private letters, but almost never see in his published writings.
Professor Jackson’s conclusion merely restates his introductory premise, 117 pages later:
Three of Livingston's Rebus poems according to Professor Jackson replicate the familiar couplet in "Night Before Christmas," by describing how moonlight turns night into day.
What the "recurrent notion" boils down to is one formula repeated three times. At best it's a clever verbal puzzle, signifying one of the needed letters via formulaic allusion. Professor Jackson solves it "T" for Thea, the Titan goddess of shining light. Granted. But play fair now. Livingston's "goddess refulgent" is Thea or Theia the mother of the moon, Selene. And the sun, Helios. And as every crossword freak knows, the Dawn, Eos. You only get Theia as the moon by overreaching. In each Rebus clue the implied Theia is rather the goddess of shining illumination and therefore the enabler of sight, figuratively understood to mean insight or wisdom--as opposed to ignorance and error. As an adjective, refulgent cannot grammatically parallel lustre, a noun. "Mid-day" (noun, again) does match up nicely with "meridian" in one of the three examples, but meridian there mainly conveys the association of the goddess with the bright light of daytime, and night with error. No natural moon is pictured there or anywhere. There's no snow either. No objects. There's literally no material thing whatsoever to be seen in any of Livingston's three Rebus couplets, beyond metaphorical ray-beams from heaven and implied insight.
Nothing comparable in Moore's Poems? Hunting up the words via the handiest of Mac Jackson's Databases with the color-coded alphabetized list of all words in all poems, I find all the key ones used by Moore, not Livingston.
Jiminy Christmas! Moore wrote a whole poem on new fallen snow: Lines / Written After a Snow-Storm. For his kids. [And as I later discovered, also published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel, two months after "A Visit from St. Nicholas."] The word lustre appears only in Moore's poems, two times. Boom, boom. The second instance occurs in a manuscript poem that Professor Jackson should have included in his counts but did not: Biography of the Heart of Clement C. Moore [Since transcribed in full on Melvilliana:
Stylometry alone rarely (never?) settles authorship questions anyway. But it’s fun to keep trying. Hopefully we’ll learn from our mistakes as we go.
All things being equal (which they're not), Professor Jackson's mission would be a fine one, prompted by the noble scholarly motive of giving credit where it’s due. Employing expertise in what he calls “computational stylistics,” he aims to determine who most likely wrote the world-beloved poem “The Night Before Christmas.” Basically Professor Jackson picks up where Don Foster left off and decides, after a grueling set of mathematical exercises, that Henry Livingston, Jr. probably wrote the best Christmas poem ever, not Clement C. Moore as traditionally supposed.
What we've got here is an entertaining and potentially instructive non-problem. On the positive side, how wonderful to learn about Henry Livingston, discover and enjoy his witty verse, and ponder the odds. And three cheers for anything that inspires people to re-read Moore and begin to appreciate his life and other works. By my calculations, the real probability that Clement C. Moore wrote “The Night Before Christmas” is still right around 102%, give or take a couple of percentage points. Fortunately, however, Professor Jackson has the scruples of a first-rate scholar. He makes his errant way so earnestly that it’s easy to spot the wrong turns. Here they are:
- False premise:
Moore sucksMoore's poetry sucks. All of it except "The Night Before Christmas." Obviously. - Disregard of historical and biographical evidence.
- Over-confidence in numbers; corresponding indifference to poetical contexts and words that mean something.
The False Premise
Rehearsing Don Foster's "'Funeral Elegy' Fiasco," Ron Rosenbaum has traced Professor Foster's overconfidence in numbers and unwise reliance on computers to his "failure of close reading." Problem was,"he was substituting a silicon chip for a tin ear." -- The Shakespeare Wars (Random House, 2006) page 173In a nutshell, that's it! Sir Brian Vickers, before he became "Sir Brian," more elaborately and devastatingly critiqued Professor Foster's methodology and results in Counterfeiting Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2002). As the Funeral Elegy fiasco reminds, anything can happen once you turn words into numbers. Professor Jackson knows this and therefore tries early on to ground his investigation on sound principles of literary criticism. Unsuccessfully, because he takes for granted the very thing he wants to test. Professor Jackson gives away his bias for Livingston in one sentence and appears not to realize the damage done to his desired stance of cool scientific objectivity:
"However, no reader of poetry with any sense of literary style and value could compare Moore’s body of verse with Livingston’s without recognizing that 'The Night Before Christmas' is a conspicuous misfit within Moore’s canon but would be comfortably at home within Livingston’s.” (11)In other words, only an idiot would align “Night Before Christmas” with the transparently awful poetry of Clement C. Moore. But if that were true, the thing is already proved by chapter 2 so we don’t need to bother with chi-squares, arithmetical means, and standard deviations. We don't even need to turn on the computer. Fortunately for the future survival of computational stylistics as a legitimate method of academic inquiry, it's not true!
Nothing at all against Henry Livingston, but his poems aren’t nearly so mellifluous and magical as Professor Jackson thinks, and Moore’s aren't so bad. Even though Livingston lived decades into the nineteenth century, his poetic sensibility (viewable at the fabulous Henry Livingston website) remained strictly and statically 18th century. The American revolution molded Livingston into a fine patriot, family man and farmer-poet, but I’m here to tell you the Romantic revolution in literature missed him in Poughkeepsie. In that regard, Livingston is like Dylan had Dylan stayed a folkie and never plugged in with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Not that Moore ever went all-Byron or Coleridge on us. Clement C. Moore shares with Livingston the usual neo-classical models like Pope, Dryden and Swift, but some of Moore’s later verse gets electrified by the subjective, emotional intensity of Southey and so-called pre-romantics or transitional poets like William Cowper and Oliver Goldsmith. Livingston values classical forms, artifice, reason and rationality, and displays of wit—hence his fondness for rebuses, acrostics, and verse paraphrases from Aesop and the Bible. And burlesques, social and political. Professor Jackson means to dismiss Moore as a “moralist” and “satirist” but see here now, those labels equally apply to Livingston who lectures his sister Joanna to count her blessings and “Meekly attend the ways of higher heav'n!” On her birthday! It’s the latent Romantic in Moore who will express people’s feelings with a degree of emotional intensity, a subjective directness you might find in Livingston’s private letters, but almost never see in his published writings.
Professor Jackson’s conclusion merely restates his introductory premise, 117 pages later:
“No experienced reader of poetry who was familiar with the verse of the two rival candidates could fail to recognize that “The Night Before Christmas” is as uncharacteristic of Moore as it is characteristic of Livingston, with his proven ability to take a child’s view of things, his intense awareness of flying creatures, and his fascination with the miniature.” (128)"No experienced reader"? O! for an esteemed and truly estimable Shakespeare scholar to bluster so. Professor Jackson’s dual purpose premise-conclusion excludes anybody who does not agree with his dim view of Moore's poetry from the ranks of discerning readers. His exclusive club of experienced readers of poetry would not have included William Alfred Jones, the accomplished essayist (as Bryant called him) and Hazlitt fan, who wrote a glowing contemporary review of Moore’s Poems that appeared in the July 17, 1847 issue of the New York Literary World. Niels Henry Sonne the distinguished librarian would not have known enough poetry by Livingston, so he's banned along with his rock solid defense of Moore's authorship on the biographical evidence. More recently, the case for Moore’s authorship has been ably upheld, in print and online, by Seth Kaller, Joe Nickell, and (as mentioned already) Stephen Nissenbaum. All excluded from the club. Professor Jackson does list Stephen Nissenbaum's excellent book and online essay in his bibliography. But he never directly engages with the enlightening discussion in There Arose Such a Clatter of "A Trip to Saratoga," the poem "that shows Moore at his most child-centered." Throughout his monograph Professor Jackson argues with Joe Nickell, without much luck.
The Tin Ear
It's most noticeable in the aforesaid rebuttal of Joe Nickell's "The Case of the Christmas Poem" (Manuscripts 55/1:5–10). That's where Professor Jackson's ear appears tinniest. I can't help calling him out, because he makes such a big deal of Livingston-like qualities he hears in these lovely lines:The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below... --A Visit from St. Nicholas
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| via Library of Congress |
That goddess refulgent whose far beaming rays,Professor Jackson explains it this way:
Dart full upon error's dark midnight their blaze. --Apollo Rebus
The Goddess refulgent whose far-beaming rays
Can pour upon error meridian blase. --Deity Rebus
That goddess refulgent whose glance pours the day,
Where midnight, and error, and ignorance lay. --War Rebus
"The moon's shedding of bright light that turns night to noonday is a recurrent notion in Livingston's verse that links it to the lines in "Visit." There is nothing comparable in Moore's Poems."Bleah!
What the "recurrent notion" boils down to is one formula repeated three times. At best it's a clever verbal puzzle, signifying one of the needed letters via formulaic allusion. Professor Jackson solves it "T" for Thea, the Titan goddess of shining light. Granted. But play fair now. Livingston's "goddess refulgent" is Thea or Theia the mother of the moon, Selene. And the sun, Helios. And as every crossword freak knows, the Dawn, Eos. You only get Theia as the moon by overreaching. In each Rebus clue the implied Theia is rather the goddess of shining illumination and therefore the enabler of sight, figuratively understood to mean insight or wisdom--as opposed to ignorance and error. As an adjective, refulgent cannot grammatically parallel lustre, a noun. "Mid-day" (noun, again) does match up nicely with "meridian" in one of the three examples, but meridian there mainly conveys the association of the goddess with the bright light of daytime, and night with error. No natural moon is pictured there or anywhere. There's no snow either. No objects. There's literally no material thing whatsoever to be seen in any of Livingston's three Rebus couplets, beyond metaphorical ray-beams from heaven and implied insight.
Nothing comparable in Moore's Poems? Hunting up the words via the handiest of Mac Jackson's Databases with the color-coded alphabetized list of all words in all poems, I find all the key ones used by Moore, not Livingston.
Jiminy Christmas! Moore wrote a whole poem on new fallen snow: Lines / Written After a Snow-Storm. For his kids. [And as I later discovered, also published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel, two months after "A Visit from St. Nicholas."] The word lustre appears only in Moore's poems, two times. Boom, boom. The second instance occurs in a manuscript poem that Professor Jackson should have included in his counts but did not: Biography of the Heart of Clement C. Moore [Since transcribed in full on Melvilliana:
There Moore as patient scholar (no ballroom beau, he) identifies himself with "constant lustre of the day" produced by "the glow-worm's steady ray." Not only lustre but "lustre of the day" which hey! to my mind qualifies as a compelling "trigram" that ought to have been considered as such in this same chapter 9, "Shared Three-Word Sequences and Parallels." Same goes for the still-smoking title of Moore's From St. Nicholas but let's not get sidetracked.
For "breast" with "snow" Professor Jackson invokes the commonest commonplace "snow-white breast" in Livingston's "As on a Summer's Fervid Day." The playful Poughkeepsian does love breasts, especially on "lovely Delia":
Here's the clincher I hear somebody asking for, with "objects" and "moon," too.
To resume counting... How many instances of objects is that altogether? Six total for Moore, paying no attention to instances where object means something like "goal" or "purpose." For Livingston? Just one, maybe, in Tears of Science where "pleasing objects" refer to distracting features of beautiful women. Dimples and eyes, of alluring females.
No way around it, Professor Jackson badly misreads the best textual parallel he can muster. To his credit, he picked glorious lines to discuss, but he can't hear the words, and won't grapple with their meaning in context. Bias for Livingston, against Moore makes him miss the most pertinent verbal associations and where they point. Moon, breast, snow, objects, and daylight lustre all harmonizingly attest to Clement C. Moore's authorship of "The Night Before Christmas."
Let’s make a pact: never to grab examples from a poem, say, without reading it first. I’m thinking now of Moore’s poem “To Southey.” Professor Jackson and Don Foster before him cite the same line from “To Southey” in order to score the same ho-hum point in favor of Foster's proposition that Moore wrote a supposedly bad Santa Claus poem. So both Moore and the author of "Old Santeclaus" adopt the expression "make their home." Fine, a commonplace. When you stop trashing Moore and actually read his verse, you see the line in question embraces what scholar Herbert F. Tucker in Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 calls the “proliferant psychedelia” in Southey's mythological romances, trippiest in The Curse of Kehama.
Moore in To Southey goes on to speak in profoundly sad, personal terms as a bereaved father and husband. Look, the Moores’ daughter Emily died in 1828 at the age of six. Clement C. Moore’s wife Eliza died in April 1830. Another daughter named Charity, age 14, died in December of the same year. So when Moore reads the dedication to “The Tale of Paraguay,” he can’t help but respond with intense emotions to Southey’s feeling words on the death of loved ones, especially his infant daughter. What Professors Foster and Jackson miss about “To Southey” is heartbreaking:
Moore lost his wife and two daughters long before he published "A Visit From St. Nicholas" over his own name in the 1844 Poems. He had perspective on fame. His personal fortune was never at risk. Not only that, the 1844 volume shows how eager Moore was to give credit wherever due. See how carefully he acknowledges his late wife and then living friends for verses they composed. Moral courage? How hard could it have been to add something like, “The following is a holiday favorite, ascribed to me by mistake." Or "I know not the original author of these popular verses, so beloved by my children.” Especially since by all accounts he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” for light family entertainment, with absolutely no idea of making it a personal monument in verse. From Moore’s perspective, he more likely needed a healthy shot of liquid courage to come clean and confess having written it.
People in the best position to know attributed “A Visit from St. Nicholas” to Clement C. Moore, early and confidently. As shown in a previous melvilliana post, Orville L. Holley on December 28, 1836 stated that he learned the author's identity only months, not years after he first published "A Visit From St. Nicholas" in The Troy Sentinel. The whole point of the 1837 New-York Book of Poetry was to name names, to identify praiseworthy New York authors of formerly “fugitive” poems in newspapers and magazines. What, the experienced writer, editor, native New Yorker and Columbia grad, the ultimate Knickerbocker Charles Fenno Hoffman got this one wrong? Not likely. I protest the implied assumption that critics now are so much smarter than brilliant journalists were or could have been in the benighted 19th century. Also, the appearance of other poems by Clement C. Moore in the 1837 volume suggests that Moore might have corresponded with Hoffman or another agent of the publisher, in advance of publication. Somehow or other Hoffman got hold of three additional poems by Moore for inclusion along with "Visit" in the New-York Book of Poetry: To A Lady (dated 1804); From a Father to His Children; and From a Husband to His Wife.
And how ironic is this. William Alfred Jones, the best and most sympathetic reviewer of Moore's Poems in the 19th century, was a great grandson of Philip Livingston. Yes, indeed. The most eloquent champion of Clement C. Moore's poetry ever, was a relative of Henry Livingston, Jr.
All honor to the Livingstons! The best chapter in Professor Jackson's book honors the Livingston family with a respectful and informative chronicle of the claim by some descendants and sympathizers that Henry Livingston, Jr. wrote "The Night Before Christmas." Predictably, however, the best piece of external evidence, poetical "visions of gaiety" in pre-1823 family correspondence is pretty weak. Commonplaces, again, and no sugar-plums. But so what. Again, all honor to Major Livingston and his descendants. Personally, I'm most grateful for all the historical information, fabulous texts and great holiday fun at Mary S. Van Deusen's website. Paying respectful attention to Livingston family narratives, I think alternative explanations could reasonably account for the mistaken impression that Henry wrote "The Night Before Christmas." Conjecture #1: Thanks to the great Henry Livingston website we know of Major Henry Livingston's regular service in composing the Carrier's Address for the Poughkeepsie Journal, traditionally published on New Year's Day. The experience of hearing the author deliver lines like this
As Don Foster found, Moore's poem appeared on the front page of the Poughkeepsie Journal on January 16, 1828, reprinted from the Philadelphia National Gazette--without comment and without naming the author.
So Henry Livingston possibly could have seen it before he passed away at the age of 79 on February 29, 1828. Maybe a family member clipped or copied it down by hand, who knows?
The viral spread of "A Visit From St. Nicholas" via newspaper printings and re-printings guaranteed an authorship controversy somewhere down the road. Sure enough, in December 1843 a reader submitted "Visit" to the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer as the work of Joseph Wood, a recently deceased artist. The National Intelligencer duly reprinted it, then quickly published a correction on December 28, 1843. Unaware of the published correction, Charles King the editor of the New York American asked the Washington editor to reprint a letter from Clement C. Moore acknowledging his authorship. In 1888, a holiday memorial article in The Churchman observed how the expected "legion of would be authors" demanding credit for "The Night Before Christmas" never materialized, and explained their non-appearance as satisfying evidence that "a well-informed public has been early possessed of the knowledge that the author was Clement Clarke Moore":
Within each set, A & B, the things Jackson chooses to count are literally meaningless bits, inconsequential and perhaps random in their distribution. He needs to explain but never does exactly how these comparisons establish authorship. Especially considering the diversity of rhetorical aims and settings in occasional poems by both writers. The “More like Livingston” vs. “More like Moore” game gets tiresome fast. Or not--since, like I said, amazing things can happen when you turn words into numbers. As Professor Jackson demonstrates with admirable clarity and precision, some individual poems by Clement C. Moore are more like poems written by Henry Livingston, Jr. in some respects. And wouldn’t you know it, some poems by Livingston are in certain respects more Moore-like. Crazy!
In chapter 6, Professor Jackson anticipates objections like mine to his numbers games. Aiming to de-mystify his method of statistical analysis, he explains he's only counting because he has to:
Without another chapter on methodology, it seems like Professor Jackson just enjoys counting the wrong things. Instances of "that." Articles, definite and indefinite. Turns out, Livingston uses the definite article “the” way more than Moore. Which means he uses the AH phoneme way more than Moore. And now we’re getting somewhere? Yes we are, in fact, only it's not where Professor Jackson meant to go. Naturally, Livingston's usual anapestic meter pumps up usage of just the things Professor Jackson has been trying to count. Meter has to skew usage of "the" and "a" and "and." And how many other elements being counted, becomes the overwhelmingly pertinent question.
Moeraki Boulders strewn along Professor Jackson's sandy beach are the building blocks of anapests.
On the Moore side, it could be useful to isolate test results for "The Pig and the Rooster," "Irish Valentine" and anything else Moore wrote in close to the same meter. Or how about comparing subsets of poems for and about kids. A number of poems by Clement C. Moore expressly situate a father in some relation to living children. Prime examples are "A Trip to Saratoga"; "To My Children after Having My Portrait Taken for them"; "From St Nicholas" (a-hem); and "Lines Written After a Snow-Storm." Henry Livingston wrote poignant lines "On My Little Catherine Sleeping" and heartfelt memorial verses. Livingston's charming "Dialogue between Madame J. L. & Her Children" pictures a mother conversing with her children. Kids want cheese, now; Mom makes them wait a few months. Unlike Clement C. Moore, however, Henry Livingston does not poetically represent a plurality of children and their father. Unless I missed something.
As we've seen, where Professor Jackson picks good parts to examine, his statistical apparatus discourages context and meaning. This flawed approach he boldly finesses as a virtue. He's avoiding bias. In the effort to be objective and not subjective, he will stick like white on rice to meaningless bits of sentences and words. Numbers of counted bits are paraded in tables over many short chapters, with diminishing concern for the meaning or merit of any individual poem by either poet.
For purposes of really useful comparing, the kind that considers distinctive meanings and contexts, the Henry Livingston website offers a great database of all the words in most (not all) poems of Livingston and Moore. You might wonder, whose working vocabulary does “The Night Before Christmas” witness, Moore’s or Livingston’s? Maybe this fantastic online resource could settle the question without ever having to worry about counting and sorting function words and phonemes. In view of Professor Jackson’s stated aim and statistical methods, it’s reasonable to expect his book to include somewhere a table giving relative frequencies of words that actually mean something: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs.
Good opportunities to examine meaningful words would seem to be in chapter 14 on “Very High-Frequency Words” and chapter 15 on “Favorite Expressions and Quirks of Style.” But Chapter 14 again exposes the basic flaw in methodology. If I understand this right, forms of be, the second commonest lexeme in English after the, have to be excluded because they're hard to count. Words that threaten to mean something risk immediate exile as “likely to be sensitive to context.” When the purified method yields results that tend to support Moore, Professor Jackson blinks. Turns out, usage in “The Night Before Christmas” of the next very high-frequency word (“to”) statistically “is closer to Moore’s mean” than Livingston’s. Oops.
Again in Chapter 15, Jackson isolates words and phrases that can't mean anything (some; oft; many a) apart from context, yet he flaunts the five-page chapter as “strong stylistic evidence” for Livingston over Moore. Among the supposedly distinctive and "conspicuous" markers of Moore’s style that Professor Jackson adduces in chapter 15 are expressions that occur 12 times (“at length”), 16 times (“in vain”), and 17 times (“many a”), not yet counting usages in Moore’s manuscript poems.
Sometimes it's good to turn off the computer and go for a drive. Driving through “The Night Before Christmas” while looking for meaningful and potentially distinctive words to examine, I find myself slowing down at ‘kerchief and braking at brains. These days we don’t hear "‘kerchief" much, and the use of “brains” likewise seems a little peculiar. Moore’s poem “A Visit to Saratoga” also features (besides Dad with multiple kids, a theme close to Moore's heart that is absent in Livingston's verse-world) a “kerchief." In conjunction with “cap,” very nice. As for brains, I half expected the speaker to say he and Mamma had “just settled down.” That's how Perry Como read it in 1953. Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians likewise sang "just settled down."
Who's the jazziest, would you guess: Dr. Moore or Major Livingston?
You got it, Dr. Moore. Moore's "corpus" boasts brains on top of brains: nineteen instances (total of combined singular and plural forms), many contextually similar to the usage in “The Night Before Christmas.” The one case of brains in a poem possibly by Henry Livingston, Jr., Filly and Wolf, uses the word with anatomical precision in reference to a dead animal. Spoiler alert: Filly kicks Wolf's brains out. Here's a veritable Moore marker, if ever there was one. Livingston never uses the word brains with reference to human psychology, thoughts or reasoning, dreams or schemes. Like Moore elsewhere, Livingston writes mind, as in the "undisturb'd mind" he wishes brother Beekman, or the "magnanimous mind" of Columbus in the Hero Rebus. In his prose Description of the Baby House of Miss Biddy Puerilla, Livingston has to say "cerrebellum."
The word brains is not required by the verse form or rhetorical situation or the homely holiday setting of “The Night Before Christmas.” Ergo, brains might well be a meaningful reflex of the author’s style and just possibly, if you’re in the mood to stretch, his personality. Hmmm. On that note, maybe brain marks the distinguishing Romantic or transitional, "pre-romantic" quality in Moore. Romantic qualities would be strongest and most perceptible, where brains in Moore's poetry are associated with the imagination, with dreams and visions, or with unsettled, disturbed patterns of thinking and feeling.
Moore’s poem A Trip to Saratoga opens on a houseful of kids, and Spring Fever everywhere disturbing Dad enough to “raise a tumult in the coolest brains.” As in "The Night Before Christmas," people’s brains in Moore’s poems rarely stay settled. The tee-totaling speaker of The Water Drinker fears and fixates on the brain-perplexing effects of alcohol. For the pleasure-seeking speaker of Moore’s Lines Written after a Season of Yellow Fever, exciting visions of dancing at the next fancy ball “rush wildly through my brain.” Impossibly abstract intellectual problems “puzzle deep reasoners’ brains” in The Pig and the Rooster.
Moore employs brain/s nineteen times, and not only for comic effects. In mournful lines To Southey, memories of the suffering endured by the speaker’s deceased loved ones are figured as “spectres that infest my brain!” These haunting visions painfully and pathetically replace the happy expectations of his former days, which Moore retrospectively calls the “faithless prospect of a dreaming brain.”
Pat, the infatuated speaker of Irish Valentine, can’t get the mental picture of his beloved out of his head:
Afterthought 11/10/2016: The banishment of Moore's Prometheus chorus from Professor Jackson's database keeps a 20th instance of brain in hiding. Prometheus chained to the rock needs help, but the humans he gifted with fire are mere "mortals" who remain powerless to challenge almighty Jove
Visions are a great Moore marker. Moore has them, Livingston don't. Eight instances of visions plural in Moore’s poems, plus seven in the singular form, add up to a total of fifteen instances--not including those tasty plums in “The Night Before Christmas.”
By contrast, Livingston uses vision only in the singular form and only one time, in a literally, deliberately dread-ful verse paraphrase from Job; and he employs “visionary” one time when versifying Aesop’s fable of the frogs who wanted a king. About the Job poem, it's interesting to note the third-person point of view in Livingston's paraphrase. Livingston looks at Job objectively. Byron by contrast renders the same biblical passage in the first person, in the lines beginning A spirit pass'd before me. Byron identifies with Job.
The “visions” in “Cholera” as in "The Night Before Christmas" are happy dreams, of carefree wining and dining and dancing. The youthful recipient of Moore’s “Valentine” enjoys “visions of delight,” meaning the prospect of a bright future. Again in “Water Drinker” visions are dreams—this time bad dreams, “goblin visions of the night” brought on by drinking alcoholic beverages. In “From a Husband to His Wife” the speaker remembers rapturous but fleeting “fairy visions,” poetically conveying the experience of being young and in love. Moore’s Wine Drinker cites “glowing thoughts and visions” among the heady benefits of drinking in moderation. Both instances of visions in Moore’s Lines Written after a Season of Yellow Fever refer to dancing, the anticipation of which engenders “visions bright” in the heart of the dancer as she excitedly beholds, in her imagination, “visions flying round, as meteors bright.” Her visions dance, quite like the visions of sugarplums in “The Night Before Christmas.” Sunrise at West Point inspires “visions” of nothing in particular—undefined, but strongly associated, again, with dreams. Indeed, Moore’s West Point “visions” at sunrise are explicitly the product of a “morning dream.”
The animated “vision” of Moore's "Apology" is diminutive (“far below the human size”) like St. Nick in his “Visit,” an elvish taskmaster who keeps Moore from abandoning the business of scholarship for the sake of pleasures like dancing and drinking. Also like St. Nick, Moore’s friendly but firm “Guardian” does not stay long but disappears, soon as his work is done:
Or is it software. Uh-oh. This always happens around the Holidays. Let me untangle my metaphors and get back to you.
Gratuitous correction, only a stocking-stuffer:
For "breast" with "snow" Professor Jackson invokes the commonest commonplace "snow-white breast" in Livingston's "As on a Summer's Fervid Day." The playful Poughkeepsian does love breasts, especially on "lovely Delia":
A breast from beauty's model madeMajor Livingston never looks at a non-human breast. Every one of the 14 occurrences of the word breast in known Livingston poems and poems attributable to him belongs to a human being. Breast with reference to any phenomenon of non-human nature occurs only once in Moore, but contextually the image is good and relevant. Lines by Moore figure "breast" in non-human terms as a "mountain's breast," in close thematic connection with all forms of water in nature including snow.
Where all the loves & graces play'd. --Spadille
Howe'er disguis'd by Nature's power,Better yet, who speaks of interesting things and people as "objects"? Who points these "objects" out to his children, and marvels at their clarity and brightness in broad daylight? Moore, of course, 3x (two plural forms, one singular) in "A Trip to Saratoga." For example:
In chrystal ice or snowy shower;
Whether to open sight reveal'd,
Or in the ambient air conceal'd;
In misty vapor if it rest
Upon some lofty mountain's breast,
In clouds bedeck the welkin blue,
Or, heav'n-distill'd, descend in dew;
In earth or sky, wherever found,
The praise of water I'll resound. --The Water-Drinker
All objects shone so lucid and so clear,Likewise the whole point of visiting West Point is to view "objects near" and far.
So sharp each outline on the deep-blue sky,
That what was distant seem'd to draw more near,
And ev'ry tint came radiant to the eye. --A Trip to Saratoga
Here's the clincher I hear somebody asking for, with "objects" and "moon," too.
"Surpris'd, I found the moon's soft silvery rayThe verse-epic "Elphinstone" (Elfin-Stone, get it?) is another poem in manuscript that, like the unpublished Biography of the Heart of Clement C. Moore, defies computerized analysis:
Spread like a mantle o'er the objects round. --Charles Elphinstone
"It is so remote in manner and matter from 'The Night Before Christmas' that breaking it down into sections and offering counts of all the authorial data is scarcely warranted."Fortunately, one grand consequence of Professor Jackson's research and the monumental work done by Mary S. Van Deusen is the online availability now of most (not all) Moore's poems, including From St. Nicholas among miscellaneous manuscript poems, and many others transcribed from the Poetry Manuscript Book of Clement C. Moore, now held by the Museum of the City of New York. These lines from "Charles Elphinstone" are worth another look:
"Surpris'd, I found the moon's soft silvery rayThe "Elphinsone" example in context invites both literal and metaphorical readings. Dying, the hero recalls this vivid experience of illuminating moonlight which he perceives in figurative terms as "an emblem of my death!" The poet goes on to claim another level of significance for the natural, physical sight of objects lit up by the moon, as a literal foretaste of the soul's experience of the "light celestial that guide's it on angels' wings to heaven. Bottom line: there is no bottom, as Ron Rosenbaum perceives in Shakespeare. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen....
Spread like a mantle o'er the objects round. --Charles Elphinstone
To resume counting... How many instances of objects is that altogether? Six total for Moore, paying no attention to instances where object means something like "goal" or "purpose." For Livingston? Just one, maybe, in Tears of Science where "pleasing objects" refer to distracting features of beautiful women. Dimples and eyes, of alluring females.
No way around it, Professor Jackson badly misreads the best textual parallel he can muster. To his credit, he picked glorious lines to discuss, but he can't hear the words, and won't grapple with their meaning in context. Bias for Livingston, against Moore makes him miss the most pertinent verbal associations and where they point. Moon, breast, snow, objects, and daylight lustre all harmonizingly attest to Clement C. Moore's authorship of "The Night Before Christmas."
Contempt of Biography
In a generous mood, Professor Jackson grants that Moore unquestionably “loved his wife and children.” That statement makes me think he has not looked into Moore’s life or poetry much. If he had, he might have paused there to consider earth-moving life events and their likely after-effects: getting married and becoming a father, most obviously, and later the devastating emotional impact on Moore of his wife’s death.Let’s make a pact: never to grab examples from a poem, say, without reading it first. I’m thinking now of Moore’s poem “To Southey.” Professor Jackson and Don Foster before him cite the same line from “To Southey” in order to score the same ho-hum point in favor of Foster's proposition that Moore wrote a supposedly bad Santa Claus poem. So both Moore and the author of "Old Santeclaus" adopt the expression "make their home." Fine, a commonplace. When you stop trashing Moore and actually read his verse, you see the line in question embraces what scholar Herbert F. Tucker in Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 calls the “proliferant psychedelia” in Southey's mythological romances, trippiest in The Curse of Kehama.
Moore in To Southey goes on to speak in profoundly sad, personal terms as a bereaved father and husband. Look, the Moores’ daughter Emily died in 1828 at the age of six. Clement C. Moore’s wife Eliza died in April 1830. Another daughter named Charity, age 14, died in December of the same year. So when Moore reads the dedication to “The Tale of Paraguay,” he can’t help but respond with intense emotions to Southey’s feeling words on the death of loved ones, especially his infant daughter. What Professors Foster and Jackson miss about “To Southey” is heartbreaking:
I saw my wife, then, to the grave descend,Biography makes a difference. Professor Jackson constructs a fictional scenario for how it went down in 1844, and imagines how much “moral courage” Moore would have needed to confess he never wrote "A Visit From St. Nicholas." Moore's imaginary moral failure goes from hypothetical to practically certain when Professor Jackson graciously pardons it as just another example of human frailty. These little slips happen to the best of us, even lawmakers and priests. Ah! humanity!
Beloved of my heart, my bosom friend.
So interwoven were our joys, our pains
That, as I weeping followed her remains,
I thought to tell her of the mournful scene—
I could not realize the gulph between. --To Southey
Moore lost his wife and two daughters long before he published "A Visit From St. Nicholas" over his own name in the 1844 Poems. He had perspective on fame. His personal fortune was never at risk. Not only that, the 1844 volume shows how eager Moore was to give credit wherever due. See how carefully he acknowledges his late wife and then living friends for verses they composed. Moral courage? How hard could it have been to add something like, “The following is a holiday favorite, ascribed to me by mistake." Or "I know not the original author of these popular verses, so beloved by my children.” Especially since by all accounts he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” for light family entertainment, with absolutely no idea of making it a personal monument in verse. From Moore’s perspective, he more likely needed a healthy shot of liquid courage to come clean and confess having written it.
People in the best position to know attributed “A Visit from St. Nicholas” to Clement C. Moore, early and confidently. As shown in a previous melvilliana post, Orville L. Holley on December 28, 1836 stated that he learned the author's identity only months, not years after he first published "A Visit From St. Nicholas" in The Troy Sentinel. The whole point of the 1837 New-York Book of Poetry was to name names, to identify praiseworthy New York authors of formerly “fugitive” poems in newspapers and magazines. What, the experienced writer, editor, native New Yorker and Columbia grad, the ultimate Knickerbocker Charles Fenno Hoffman got this one wrong? Not likely. I protest the implied assumption that critics now are so much smarter than brilliant journalists were or could have been in the benighted 19th century. Also, the appearance of other poems by Clement C. Moore in the 1837 volume suggests that Moore might have corresponded with Hoffman or another agent of the publisher, in advance of publication. Somehow or other Hoffman got hold of three additional poems by Moore for inclusion along with "Visit" in the New-York Book of Poetry: To A Lady (dated 1804); From a Father to His Children; and From a Husband to His Wife.
And how ironic is this. William Alfred Jones, the best and most sympathetic reviewer of Moore's Poems in the 19th century, was a great grandson of Philip Livingston. Yes, indeed. The most eloquent champion of Clement C. Moore's poetry ever, was a relative of Henry Livingston, Jr.
All honor to the Livingstons! The best chapter in Professor Jackson's book honors the Livingston family with a respectful and informative chronicle of the claim by some descendants and sympathizers that Henry Livingston, Jr. wrote "The Night Before Christmas." Predictably, however, the best piece of external evidence, poetical "visions of gaiety" in pre-1823 family correspondence is pretty weak. Commonplaces, again, and no sugar-plums. But so what. Again, all honor to Major Livingston and his descendants. Personally, I'm most grateful for all the historical information, fabulous texts and great holiday fun at Mary S. Van Deusen's website. Paying respectful attention to Livingston family narratives, I think alternative explanations could reasonably account for the mistaken impression that Henry wrote "The Night Before Christmas." Conjecture #1: Thanks to the great Henry Livingston website we know of Major Henry Livingston's regular service in composing the Carrier's Address for the Poughkeepsie Journal, traditionally published on New Year's Day. The experience of hearing the author deliver lines like this
But hark what a clatter! the Jolly bells ringing,conceivably might have morphed over time and blended with other holiday memories of reading or hearing "A Visit From St. Nicholas." (If you're smiling at my hypocrisy here, after complaining about Professor Jackson's fantasy of moral failure by Moore, please consider that the facts are already for Moore. Another advantage: I don't have to impute bad faith to the Livingstons or anybody, whereas Professor Jackson does.)
The lads and the lasses so jovially singing,
Tis New-Years they shout and then haul me along
In the midst of their merry-make Juvenile throng;
But I burst from their grasp: unforgetful of duty
To first pay obeisence to wisdom and Beauty,
My conscience and int'rest unite to command it,
And you, my kind PATRONS, deserve & demand it.
On your patience to trespass no longer I dare,
So bowing, I wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR.
--1819 Carrier's Address, Poughkeepsie Journal
As Don Foster found, Moore's poem appeared on the front page of the Poughkeepsie Journal on January 16, 1828, reprinted from the Philadelphia National Gazette--without comment and without naming the author.
So Henry Livingston possibly could have seen it before he passed away at the age of 79 on February 29, 1828. Maybe a family member clipped or copied it down by hand, who knows?
The viral spread of "A Visit From St. Nicholas" via newspaper printings and re-printings guaranteed an authorship controversy somewhere down the road. Sure enough, in December 1843 a reader submitted "Visit" to the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer as the work of Joseph Wood, a recently deceased artist. The National Intelligencer duly reprinted it, then quickly published a correction on December 28, 1843. Unaware of the published correction, Charles King the editor of the New York American asked the Washington editor to reprint a letter from Clement C. Moore acknowledging his authorship. In 1888, a holiday memorial article in The Churchman observed how the expected "legion of would be authors" demanding credit for "The Night Before Christmas" never materialized, and explained their non-appearance as satisfying evidence that "a well-informed public has been early possessed of the knowledge that the author was Clement Clarke Moore":
"Probably no American poem is more widely and favorably known than this, and the only wonder is that it has not been claimed by a legion of would be authors. It is doubtless because a well-informed public has been early possessed of the knowledge that the author was Clement Clarke Moore, son of Bishop Benjamin Moore, the second Bishop of New York. What is less generally known is that Mr. Moore studied for Holy Orders, but never presented himself for the ministry." --The Churchman - December 22, 1888
“Counting is imperative…”
Professor Jackson conducts us through a series of tests comparing A to B, the set of Moore’s poems to the set of Livingston's known poems. Not all of Moore's poems, though--some good ones are missing from the data set of Moore's "corpus." On shaky ground, Professor Jackson withholds from the Moore-side (besides “The Night Before Christmas”) the manuscript "Biography of the Heart of Clement C. Moore" (Ouch!), the manuscript sonnet from Petrarch, the verse translation from Aeschylus' Prometheus, and Moore's "Ode to Nice." The last three apparently are forbidden as translations, but the reason why verse translations don't count as legitimate poetry needs a more thorough discussion than Professor Jackson gives. That discussion also would need to explain the reason for including Livingston's paraphrases from Aesop and verses based on biblical passages in Habakkuk, Hezekiah, Isaiah, and Job. Professor Jackson does include The Mischievous Muse (of dancing) which Moore rendered from a canzonet by his friend and Italian teacher Lorenzo Da Ponte. Good to have in the mix, but keeping in "Muse" ("translated from the Italian of Signor Da Ponte") makes the translation-bar seem all the more arbitrary. Speaking of subjective and questionable value judgements, Professor Jackson would prefer not to bother with Moore's verse-epic in manuscript, "Charles Elphinstone.""Charles Elphinstone" is a long pseudo-autobiographical "epic" blank-verse narrative about the struggle between the powers of heaven and hell for the hero's "immortal soul." It is so remote in manner and matter from "The Night Before Christmas" that breaking it down into sections and offering counts of all the authorial data is scarcely warranted.Nevertheless... Professor Jackson does in fact give raw counts and percentages for the whole of "Charles Elphinstone," same as for the other manuscript poems (except that translated sonnet): Moore markers, high- and medium-high-frequency words, phoneme pairs, articles definite and indefinite, and attributive adjectives. Whew! Just when I thought Elfin-Stone was benched, he's back in the game. Good. Still, the unjustified exclusion of some Moore data and inclusion of some Livingston data just possibly invalidates the whole experiment.
--MacDonald P. Jackson - Who Wrote - page 91
Within each set, A & B, the things Jackson chooses to count are literally meaningless bits, inconsequential and perhaps random in their distribution. He needs to explain but never does exactly how these comparisons establish authorship. Especially considering the diversity of rhetorical aims and settings in occasional poems by both writers. The “More like Livingston” vs. “More like Moore” game gets tiresome fast. Or not--since, like I said, amazing things can happen when you turn words into numbers. As Professor Jackson demonstrates with admirable clarity and precision, some individual poems by Clement C. Moore are more like poems written by Henry Livingston, Jr. in some respects. And wouldn’t you know it, some poems by Livingston are in certain respects more Moore-like. Crazy!
In chapter 6, Professor Jackson anticipates objections like mine to his numbers games. Aiming to de-mystify his method of statistical analysis, he explains he's only counting because he has to:
“But the claim that a particular poem, play, or novel is “more like” the work of A than B is essentially a claim about frequency—that A employs a certain kind of linguistic unit (sentence, phrase, word, phoneme) more (or less) often than B, relative to the sizes of their respective corpora. And to make the claim good, counting is imperative…”Agreed then, we have to count things. Count what? is the question. Since we're all about establishing authorship, here again the methodology deserves a more expansive discussion than we get. How and why exactly do common words discriminate better than uncommon ones? As hinted at the outset, I myself am abnormally interested in the possibilities here. Granting the vaunted success of such tests when investigating authorship of plays written by professional playwrights in Renaissance England, I want to know if and how they should be adapted for American amateurs writing mostly occasional verse in a different century.
Without another chapter on methodology, it seems like Professor Jackson just enjoys counting the wrong things. Instances of "that." Articles, definite and indefinite. Turns out, Livingston uses the definite article “the” way more than Moore. Which means he uses the AH phoneme way more than Moore. And now we’re getting somewhere? Yes we are, in fact, only it's not where Professor Jackson meant to go. Naturally, Livingston's usual anapestic meter pumps up usage of just the things Professor Jackson has been trying to count. Meter has to skew usage of "the" and "a" and "and." And how many other elements being counted, becomes the overwhelmingly pertinent question.
Moeraki Boulders strewn along Professor Jackson's sandy beach are the building blocks of anapests.
"don’t be fooled into thinking they are the only ones – there’s tons!"To his everlasting credit, Professor Jackson counts the rocks in his way and eventually recognizes them as functions of meter. Indeed, if you're on a deadline and need to cut to the chase, go right to page 97. I told you Professor Jackson has scruples, and here in chapter 18 is where he proves it by walking back earlier claims in chapter 7 for the discriminating value of attributive adjectives:
-- 20 Crazy Rock Formations in New Zealand
So it seems likely that the meter militates against the liberal use of adjectives.... It would be reasonable to infer that Livingston's lower rates than Moore's are in part due to his much greater use of anapests, and that Moore could conceivably have written a poem in anapests that was as sparing of adjectives as "The Night Before Christmas."With that concession, it's all over but the crying.
--MacDonald P. Jackson - Who Wrote - pages 97-98
"Anapestic tetrameter is more familiar from comic poetry, like Twas the night before Christmas, Yertle the Turtle, and other Doctor Seuss stories." -- AngelaD on Eminem via Genius
As we've seen, where Professor Jackson picks good parts to examine, his statistical apparatus discourages context and meaning. This flawed approach he boldly finesses as a virtue. He's avoiding bias. In the effort to be objective and not subjective, he will stick like white on rice to meaningless bits of sentences and words. Numbers of counted bits are paraded in tables over many short chapters, with diminishing concern for the meaning or merit of any individual poem by either poet.
For purposes of really useful comparing, the kind that considers distinctive meanings and contexts, the Henry Livingston website offers a great database of all the words in most (not all) poems of Livingston and Moore. You might wonder, whose working vocabulary does “The Night Before Christmas” witness, Moore’s or Livingston’s? Maybe this fantastic online resource could settle the question without ever having to worry about counting and sorting function words and phonemes. In view of Professor Jackson’s stated aim and statistical methods, it’s reasonable to expect his book to include somewhere a table giving relative frequencies of words that actually mean something: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs.
Good opportunities to examine meaningful words would seem to be in chapter 14 on “Very High-Frequency Words” and chapter 15 on “Favorite Expressions and Quirks of Style.” But Chapter 14 again exposes the basic flaw in methodology. If I understand this right, forms of be, the second commonest lexeme in English after the, have to be excluded because they're hard to count. Words that threaten to mean something risk immediate exile as “likely to be sensitive to context.” When the purified method yields results that tend to support Moore, Professor Jackson blinks. Turns out, usage in “The Night Before Christmas” of the next very high-frequency word (“to”) statistically “is closer to Moore’s mean” than Livingston’s. Oops.
Again in Chapter 15, Jackson isolates words and phrases that can't mean anything (some; oft; many a) apart from context, yet he flaunts the five-page chapter as “strong stylistic evidence” for Livingston over Moore. Among the supposedly distinctive and "conspicuous" markers of Moore’s style that Professor Jackson adduces in chapter 15 are expressions that occur 12 times (“at length”), 16 times (“in vain”), and 17 times (“many a”), not yet counting usages in Moore’s manuscript poems.
Sometimes it's good to turn off the computer and go for a drive. Driving through “The Night Before Christmas” while looking for meaningful and potentially distinctive words to examine, I find myself slowing down at ‘kerchief and braking at brains. These days we don’t hear "‘kerchief" much, and the use of “brains” likewise seems a little peculiar. Moore’s poem “A Visit to Saratoga” also features (besides Dad with multiple kids, a theme close to Moore's heart that is absent in Livingston's verse-world) a “kerchief." In conjunction with “cap,” very nice. As for brains, I half expected the speaker to say he and Mamma had “just settled down.” That's how Perry Como read it in 1953. Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians likewise sang "just settled down."
Brains
Louis Armstrong reads “settled our brains.” Wynton Marsalis, too. So Jazz cats love the brains line!Who's the jazziest, would you guess: Dr. Moore or Major Livingston?
You got it, Dr. Moore. Moore's "corpus" boasts brains on top of brains: nineteen instances (total of combined singular and plural forms), many contextually similar to the usage in “The Night Before Christmas.” The one case of brains in a poem possibly by Henry Livingston, Jr., Filly and Wolf, uses the word with anatomical precision in reference to a dead animal. Spoiler alert: Filly kicks Wolf's brains out. Here's a veritable Moore marker, if ever there was one. Livingston never uses the word brains with reference to human psychology, thoughts or reasoning, dreams or schemes. Like Moore elsewhere, Livingston writes mind, as in the "undisturb'd mind" he wishes brother Beekman, or the "magnanimous mind" of Columbus in the Hero Rebus. In his prose Description of the Baby House of Miss Biddy Puerilla, Livingston has to say "cerrebellum."
The word brains is not required by the verse form or rhetorical situation or the homely holiday setting of “The Night Before Christmas.” Ergo, brains might well be a meaningful reflex of the author’s style and just possibly, if you’re in the mood to stretch, his personality. Hmmm. On that note, maybe brain marks the distinguishing Romantic or transitional, "pre-romantic" quality in Moore. Romantic qualities would be strongest and most perceptible, where brains in Moore's poetry are associated with the imagination, with dreams and visions, or with unsettled, disturbed patterns of thinking and feeling.
Moore’s poem A Trip to Saratoga opens on a houseful of kids, and Spring Fever everywhere disturbing Dad enough to “raise a tumult in the coolest brains.” As in "The Night Before Christmas," people’s brains in Moore’s poems rarely stay settled. The tee-totaling speaker of The Water Drinker fears and fixates on the brain-perplexing effects of alcohol. For the pleasure-seeking speaker of Moore’s Lines Written after a Season of Yellow Fever, exciting visions of dancing at the next fancy ball “rush wildly through my brain.” Impossibly abstract intellectual problems “puzzle deep reasoners’ brains” in The Pig and the Rooster.
Moore employs brain/s nineteen times, and not only for comic effects. In mournful lines To Southey, memories of the suffering endured by the speaker’s deceased loved ones are figured as “spectres that infest my brain!” These haunting visions painfully and pathetically replace the happy expectations of his former days, which Moore retrospectively calls the “faithless prospect of a dreaming brain.”
Pat, the infatuated speaker of Irish Valentine, can’t get the mental picture of his beloved out of his head:
“But, sure, thro' my brain how your image kept jaunting!”At evening balls in the resort town of Newport, the blaring music and bright lights “confound” the eye and what else? Right, “the brain.” Charles Elphinstone features six instances of the word brain, unsettled variously in that manuscript poem by anxieties, fever, mysteries, dreams, and delirium. Also in a serious vein, Lines on the Sisters of Charity depict the excited mind of a party-girl as a “giddy brain.”
Afterthought 11/10/2016: The banishment of Moore's Prometheus chorus from Professor Jackson's database keeps a 20th instance of brain in hiding. Prometheus chained to the rock needs help, but the humans he gifted with fire are mere "mortals" who remain powerless to challenge almighty Jove
As dreams which haunt the fever'd brain. (Revised in the 1844 Poems volume to "feverish brain.")
Visions and Dread
Besides brains, the words visions and dread also attest to the compatible style of other poems by Moore when compared with “The Night Before Christmas.” Some but not all instances are reviewed by Joe Nickell and listed with other verbal parallels.Visions are a great Moore marker. Moore has them, Livingston don't. Eight instances of visions plural in Moore’s poems, plus seven in the singular form, add up to a total of fifteen instances--not including those tasty plums in “The Night Before Christmas.”
By contrast, Livingston uses vision only in the singular form and only one time, in a literally, deliberately dread-ful verse paraphrase from Job; and he employs “visionary” one time when versifying Aesop’s fable of the frogs who wanted a king. About the Job poem, it's interesting to note the third-person point of view in Livingston's paraphrase. Livingston looks at Job objectively. Byron by contrast renders the same biblical passage in the first person, in the lines beginning A spirit pass'd before me. Byron identifies with Job.
The “visions” in “Cholera” as in "The Night Before Christmas" are happy dreams, of carefree wining and dining and dancing. The youthful recipient of Moore’s “Valentine” enjoys “visions of delight,” meaning the prospect of a bright future. Again in “Water Drinker” visions are dreams—this time bad dreams, “goblin visions of the night” brought on by drinking alcoholic beverages. In “From a Husband to His Wife” the speaker remembers rapturous but fleeting “fairy visions,” poetically conveying the experience of being young and in love. Moore’s Wine Drinker cites “glowing thoughts and visions” among the heady benefits of drinking in moderation. Both instances of visions in Moore’s Lines Written after a Season of Yellow Fever refer to dancing, the anticipation of which engenders “visions bright” in the heart of the dancer as she excitedly beholds, in her imagination, “visions flying round, as meteors bright.” Her visions dance, quite like the visions of sugarplums in “The Night Before Christmas.” Sunrise at West Point inspires “visions” of nothing in particular—undefined, but strongly associated, again, with dreams. Indeed, Moore’s West Point “visions” at sunrise are explicitly the product of a “morning dream.”
The animated “vision” of Moore's "Apology" is diminutive (“far below the human size”) like St. Nick in his “Visit,” an elvish taskmaster who keeps Moore from abandoning the business of scholarship for the sake of pleasures like dancing and drinking. Also like St. Nick, Moore’s friendly but firm “Guardian” does not stay long but disappears, soon as his work is done:
So spoke the friendly power; then, waving lightThen there’s "dread." Don Foster malevolently but accurately established the word dread as a Moore marker. Foster made dread out to be a bad sign, but a good clue to Moore's identity as the first Grinch who stole Christmas. Stephen Nissenbaum answers with impeccable logic that
His azure pinions, vanish'd from my sight.
--Apology for Not Accepting an Invitation to a Ball
“in his own terms the appearance of this word in ‘The Night Before Christmas’ (and at a key moment in its narrative) ought to constitute textual evidence of Moore's authorship.” --There Arose Such a ClatterJoe Nickell lists a couple of examples of dread in the online Comparison of Phraseology at Seth Kaller’s website. One particularly revealing instance, not listed by Nickell, occurs in Moore’s poem “A Trip to Saratoga.”
Ah no! her ev'ry word and ev'ry lookStephen Nissenbaum in There Arose Such a Clatter very helpfully contextualizes “A Trip to Saratoga” as a light verse satire, a humorous travelogue in the manner of Byron’s Childe Harold only more family-friendly. The father-with-kids theme of the whole poem recalls the setting of "The Night Before Christmas." Besides that, the usage of dread in the lines quoted above is remarkably similar to the usage of dread in “The Night Before Christmas”:
Proclaim'd that no such fate she need to dread; --A Trip to Saratoga
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,In both cases, dread occurs as an end-rhyme. Not only end-rhyme, but end rhyme in the infinitive form “to dread.” Moreover, the two examples exhibit parallel thought, structure, and syntax. Thought: facial features display harmlessness. Structure: next line begins with synonymous verbs, both in the past tense (proclaimed/gave to know). Syntax: negatively constructed with “no such” in “Saratoga” comparable to “nothing” in “The Night Before Christmas.”
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
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| via Library of Congress |
Clement C. Moore's wondering eyes and ear
You should have heard just what I seen.... --Bo Diddley, Who Do You LoveOne instance of wondering, compressed for the sake of meter--imabic tetrameter--to wond'ring, does not appear in Joe Nickell’s Comparison of Phraseology:
Thus whisper'd in his wond'ring ear. --To the Nymphs of Mount HarmonyIn a conventional move of pastoral verse, Moore’s shepherd in “To the Nymphs of Mount Harmony” hears in his “wond’ring ear” the complaints of an Arcadian “sprite” or fairy (or elf, like jolly old you-know-who), a “mournful spirit of the wood.” He tells of his enchantment by a fiend, the cause of his present captivity in the woods. The imprisoned elf hopes the nymphs will return to the woods someday and release him from the evil spell. What the whispering spirit misses most is their dancing and singing. If those fine maids ever do come back, he vows to join them.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear... --A Visit from St. NicholasIt 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. Clement C. Moore had the right hardware.
Or is it software. Uh-oh. This always happens around the Holidays. Let me untangle my metaphors and get back to you.
Gratuitous correction, only a stocking-stuffer:
- Bulwer as in Edward Bulwer-Lytton is misspelled 4x as “Bulmer.”
- The surname of Scott's Dutch smuggler in Guy Mannering is misspelled 3x as "Halteraick." This seems to be a fairly common misreading of scanned 19th century texts by OCR systems. It's Hatteraick, with two "t's."
- Jackson misspells middle name of Edgar Allan Poe as "Alan" on page 19.
- In footnote 19 to Chapter 3 (page 179), "Blitzem" is a mistake for Blitzen. An obvious typo, just when Jackson wants us to read Moore's changes to reindeer names as "suspicious." Oops.
- On page 119, the printed text reads "Sarah Hackett" when Jackson obviously refers to "Sarah Sackett." Sackett not Hackett.
- "not" should be "nor" in chapter 23 (Summary and Conclusions) page 134, where the second sentence in the second full paragraph reads "But this is neither here not there."
"And away they all flew like the down of a thistle:" --First printing of A Visit from St Nicholas
Happy Christmas! 12/07/2021... the Christian name of Niels H. Sonne is misspelled "Neils" 3x on pages 111, 176, and 189. Sonne's important article appeared in December 1972 not 1971 as incorrectly given in the bibliography, page 189.
Sonne, Niels H. “‘The Night Before Christmas’: Who Wrote It?” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 41, no. 4 (1972): 373–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42973358.
Related posts:
- Champ Prevails, review of The Fight for "The Night"
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/12/champ-prevails-experts-foiled-truth.html
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