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Twas the Night Before Christmas · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:22
Speaker 2: There are some sure signs that the holidays have arrived.
0:26
Speaker 2: The lights go up on main street of the town
0:28
Speaker 2: where I live. People pull their coats a little tighter
0:31
Speaker 2: around them as they go from shop to shop, and
0:35
Speaker 2: my colleague, then the daf Haffrey, shows up to tell
0:38
Speaker 2: me some absolutely crazy story about Christmas.
0:45
Speaker 3: Twas the Night before Christmas. He and God and all
0:47
Speaker 3: through the house not a creature was stirring, not even
0:51
Speaker 3: a mouse. That's right.
0:53
Speaker 2: This, of course, is a visit from Saint Nicholas, more
0:56
Speaker 2: commonly known as Twas the Night before Christmas, a poem
0:59
Speaker 2: that Ben has let's just say, learned a little too
1:03
Speaker 2: much about over the past few months.
1:05
Speaker 3: Have you read the Stuart Little version of this, where,
1:08
Speaker 3: to save Stuart's feelings, the Littles rewrite it as not
1:11
Speaker 3: even a Laus, because I don't want it. This too
1:14
Speaker 3: demeaning to my His poem's everywhere. It's in Stuart Little.
1:19
Speaker 3: It's die hard presidents read this poem. The stockings were
1:23
Speaker 3: hung by the chimney with care, in hopes the Saint
1:26
Speaker 3: Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all
1:30
Speaker 3: snug in their beds, while visions of sugar.
1:32
Speaker 1: Sugar pumps danced in their heads.
1:34
Speaker 3: I'm on her kerchief and I in my cap had
1:36
Speaker 3: just settled our brains. Very weird choice of words there
1:40
Speaker 3: for a long winters.
1:41
Speaker 2: Now this went on for.
1:43
Speaker 3: What quick I knew in a moment it must be nick.
1:48
Speaker 3: So this is this is the poem that creates, it
1:52
Speaker 3: fully launches the modern Santa Claus. It's his, it's the
1:56
Speaker 3: first time the reindeers are named. It's the first time
1:58
Speaker 3: he gets eight and not one. And it's it. It
2:02
Speaker 3: is the blueprint for American Christmas. Very everyone thinks Christmas
2:06
Speaker 3: is this ancient thing. There's no ever since that Jesus
2:10
Speaker 3: Christ was born on December twenty fifth. The whole thing
2:12
Speaker 3: is this invented tradition, and it is this poem that
2:17
Speaker 3: gives us the modern American Christmas. Written by Clement Clark
2:21
Speaker 3: Moore in eighteen twenty two, published in Upstate New York
2:24
Speaker 3: and The Troy Sentinel in eighteen twenty three.
2:26
Speaker 2: Until you mentioned this to me, hadn't fully understood how
2:31
Speaker 2: extraordinary this accomplishment of this poem is. I don't even
2:35
Speaker 2: like Christmas, I could guests.
2:36
Speaker 3: So we've established this in prior versions of our Christmas.
2:39
Speaker 2: Episode, I can get halfway through that from memory. I
2:42
Speaker 2: suspect that an insanely high percentage of Americans can get
2:47
Speaker 2: a significant way into this poem from memory.
2:49
Speaker 3: I would stake my life on the fact that more
2:52
Speaker 3: people this is the only poem that most people know totally.
2:56
Speaker 2: Agree total, And I was going to say that an
3:00
Speaker 2: incredibly higher percentage of people of Americas not only know
3:03
Speaker 2: this poem from memory, but no other poems at this
3:07
Speaker 2: length from memory absolutely yeah.
3:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, but the first thing people would have read
3:12
Speaker 3: of the Night Before Christmas is not even the poem.
3:14
Speaker 3: In fact, it begins it is introduced by an editor's
3:17
Speaker 3: note that starts with the line we know not to
3:20
Speaker 3: whom we are indebted for the following description of that
3:23
Speaker 3: unwearied patron of children dot dot Santa Claus. Yeah, it
3:27
Speaker 3: starts by acknowledging that they don't know who wrote it.
3:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
3:31
Speaker 2: So it begins with an authorship mystery, and the authorship
3:34
Speaker 2: mystery persists.
3:36
Speaker 3: Yes, so I propose to end it here today.
3:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things
3:45
Speaker 2: overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today we bring you
3:53
Speaker 2: our annual holiday spectacular, which this year is not about
3:57
Speaker 2: sugar plums, but about a historic theft, a literary crime
4:02
Speaker 2: that begins with a bold accusation. For nearly two hundred years,
4:08
Speaker 2: have we your TRIPU did this immensely famous poem to
4:12
Speaker 2: the wrong person? My colleague bend Adaf Haffrey has a story. Oh,
4:22
Speaker 2: one last thing. If you're listening with young children familiar
4:25
Speaker 2: with Santa Claus, this episode might challenge their sense of reality,
4:30
Speaker 2: Proceed with caution.
4:34
Speaker 3: Sometime in the late nineteen nineties, a woman named Mary
4:37
Speaker 3: van Dusen logged onto the Internet. She was looking up
4:40
Speaker 3: her great great great great great grandfather, Major Henry Livingston junior.
4:45
Speaker 3: That's right, seven generations back, and while browsing the World
4:49
Speaker 3: Wide Web, she came across a piece of information that
4:53
Speaker 3: changed the course of her life.
4:55
Speaker 4: One of the pages that came up was just a
4:58
Speaker 4: very short little page, but it said two things. It
5:02
Speaker 4: said that Henry Livingston was a possible author of Night
5:07
Speaker 4: before Christmas, and it said that he had named his
5:11
Speaker 4: reindeer for the horses in his stable. Who would believe it?
5:17
Speaker 3: Henry Livingston Junior was a gentleman farmer and poet from
5:20
Speaker 3: a prominent early American family. He was reputed to be
5:23
Speaker 3: a great lover of Christmas, and, crucially for our purposes today,
5:27
Speaker 3: not Clement Clark Moore, the person who had claimed authorship
5:31
Speaker 3: of the poem not long after its publication, and who
5:33
Speaker 3: for almost two centuries the general public has believed wrote it.
5:37
Speaker 3: So to Marry and others in her family, it seemed
5:40
Speaker 3: he was also the victim of a historic injustice. Just
5:44
Speaker 3: a couple decades after a visit from Saint Nicholas, the
5:47
Speaker 3: poem was published, his granddaughter came across a best selling
5:50
Speaker 3: holiday edition and saw the author's name clearly printed, Clement
5:55
Speaker 3: Clark Moore, at which point she brought it in a
5:58
Speaker 3: hurry to her mother, Henry's daughter in law, who said,
6:01
Speaker 3: someone has made a mistake. Clement Moore did not write
6:04
Speaker 3: the night before Christmas. Your grandfather, Henry Livingston wrote it.
6:08
Speaker 4: They saw a wrong that needed to be writed.
6:11
Speaker 3: So then you start looking at this right now. Henry
6:16
Speaker 3: had never claimed authorship himself, but he died in eighteen
6:19
Speaker 3: twenty eight, so no one could ask him about it.
6:22
Speaker 3: But the family remembered it as Henry's poem, and they
6:25
Speaker 3: took it upon themselves to do the research to prove
6:27
Speaker 3: it to the world, and so began the Great Livingston Quest.
6:32
Speaker 3: This is Montague's and Cabulot's Hatfield and McCoy's Christmas Edition.
6:42
Speaker 4: The first person took it up were the children of Catherine,
6:48
Speaker 4: my fourth grade grandmother, so I was always pleased about that.
6:52
Speaker 3: At the beginning, all the family had was recollection relatives
6:56
Speaker 3: who said that Henry Livingston Junior had read the poem
6:59
Speaker 3: aloud to them when they were kids, but they needed
7:02
Speaker 3: to establish a record. The gold standard would be a
7:05
Speaker 3: copy of the poem written in Henry's hand.
7:09
Speaker 4: Decided they would collect as many pieces of paper as
7:12
Speaker 4: they could, and this is really a godsend because they
7:16
Speaker 4: were able to contact two of Henry's children before they died.
7:21
Speaker 3: They heard that someone had gotten a copy of the
7:23
Speaker 3: poem that had Henry's handwriting on it, and do we
7:26
Speaker 3: have it today or no.
7:28
Speaker 4: We don't because they're living on the frontier and the
7:32
Speaker 4: original burned in one of the house fires.
7:35
Speaker 3: But the livingstones didn't quit. When we talked, Mary walked
7:39
Speaker 3: me through the generations of people who've taken up the quest.
7:42
Speaker 4: Since The next search for proof of Henry's authorship is
7:50
Speaker 4: from Henry Livingstone, a babylon Long Island.
7:55
Speaker 3: I began to understand that this search was a kind
7:57
Speaker 3: of Livingstonian rite of passage, something handed from generation to
8:01
Speaker 3: generation like a precious gemstone, or like a feudal title,
8:06
Speaker 3: a matter of destiny.
8:08
Speaker 4: Having your name in your birth announcement as having to
8:12
Speaker 4: research night before Christmas puts burden on your shoulders that
8:16
Speaker 4: is very heavy.
8:18
Speaker 3: After all, this is an eminent family. The genealogical tree
8:22
Speaker 3: Mary has put together includes George H. W. Bush W
8:26
Speaker 3: and Jeb as well as a congressman and a mayor
8:29
Speaker 3: of New York. Eleanor Roosevelt was also in the mix somehow.
8:32
Speaker 3: But alongside the campaigns and inaugurations, there is a single
8:36
Speaker 3: golden thread, the authorship question. And I think part of
8:41
Speaker 3: that fixation must have had to do with what poetry
8:44
Speaker 3: meant at the time. Malcolm and I talked about that
8:47
Speaker 3: over a glass of agnog at the annual Revision's History
8:50
Speaker 3: Holiday party.
8:51
Speaker 2: One of the things that interests me it is a
8:53
Speaker 2: poem created in a very specific moment in time, the
8:56
Speaker 2: early nineteenth century, and because poetry plays a role in
9:02
Speaker 2: public life in back then in a way that it
9:04
Speaker 2: doesn't know.
9:05
Speaker 3: Right, Well, some newspapers are the mass the mass medium, right,
9:09
Speaker 3: there's not television, radio, recorded sound doesn't exist. So you
9:15
Speaker 3: have poems all over the place in newspapers and they
9:19
Speaker 3: are there.
9:19
Speaker 1: They are off, they.
9:20
Speaker 3: Can be satirical, they can be funny. They're these very concise,
9:24
Speaker 3: pithy ways of expressing popular sentiments. And the ones that
9:29
Speaker 3: are really gonna give you a good example, yeah, please.
9:31
Speaker 2: My mom grew up in Jamaica during the Second World War,
9:35
Speaker 2: has all these hilarious poems written about the Second World
9:39
Speaker 2: War from a Jamaican perspective. My favorite this one might
9:42
Speaker 2: be an it might be an English one. You know,
9:45
Speaker 2: there are all these Americans come over in our station
9:47
Speaker 2: in England before the D Day. So she would as
9:51
Speaker 2: a kid, my mom would recite this one, the gum
9:53
Speaker 2: chewing ink and the cut chewing cow, very alike. The
9:57
Speaker 2: difference somehow, what is the difference? I've got it now,
10:01
Speaker 2: the intelligent look on the face of the cow. But
10:05
Speaker 2: it's to the point, right right that a lot of
10:08
Speaker 2: these what but the users trying to navigate is the
10:11
Speaker 2: indignity of this huge country of what people they consider
10:16
Speaker 2: to be their inferiors, uncultured coming and saving their bacon. Right,
10:23
Speaker 2: it's humiliating, and how do they make sense of that humiliation?
10:28
Speaker 1: To these poems?
10:28
Speaker 2: Poems are doing all this.
10:30
Speaker 3: Work very much like I'm almost like a meme today
10:32
Speaker 3: where it's like you see a thing and you're like,
10:34
Speaker 3: that gets it, that somehow ineffably puts its finger right
10:37
Speaker 3: on the pulse. Yeah, And the pulse this poem had
10:42
Speaker 3: its finger on was that there was a crisis of Christmas.
10:46
Speaker 3: At the very moment of its publication.
10:48
Speaker 5: Before the visit trend from Saint Nick, Christmas was celebrated
10:54
Speaker 5: in a very different way.
10:56
Speaker 3: Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize, shortlisted the Battle
11:00
Speaker 3: for Christmas in his book. He argues that Christmas was
11:04
Speaker 3: always about these social inversions. So lower class people would
11:08
Speaker 3: live like kings for the best food, the best ale presents,
11:12
Speaker 3: provided they were peasants from then on. But those traditions
11:16
Speaker 3: were better suited to grand old country estates where everyone
11:19
Speaker 3: knew each other and kind of accepted where they fit
11:21
Speaker 3: in the pecking order. That was not the case in
11:25
Speaker 3: modern American democratic cities.
11:28
Speaker 5: It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something
11:33
Speaker 5: of a cross between Halloween and New Year's Eve because
11:38
Speaker 5: of what amount to trick or treat. Bands of young men,
11:42
Speaker 5: most of them pour from the working classes, went roving
11:46
Speaker 5: around town. They'd stop at the more prosperous homes where
11:51
Speaker 5: they'd ask for food and alcohol. But if they didn't
11:54
Speaker 5: get what they wanted, they would ostentatiously withhold that goodwill,
12:02
Speaker 5: or they might even threaten to do some small damage.
12:06
Speaker 3: Christmas was getting out of control, and so a group
12:09
Speaker 3: of elite New Yorkers took the matter in hand.
12:12
Speaker 5: We're talking about a small group of people who call
12:15
Speaker 5: themselves Knickerbackers, after the Dutch origins of the city. But
12:20
Speaker 5: this was a kind of identity that they tried on
12:24
Speaker 5: to create again a sense of the good old days
12:27
Speaker 5: of New York when the classes did get along and
12:32
Speaker 5: the meshing worked very well.
12:34
Speaker 3: The Knickerbockers were a conservative organization trying to invent new
12:38
Speaker 3: American traditions and also great names for basketball teams go NIXX,
12:42
Speaker 3: and they found a figurehead for their new version of
12:44
Speaker 3: Christmas in Saint Nicholas of Myra, patron Saint of merchants, bakers, brides,
12:49
Speaker 3: the falsely accused.
12:51
Speaker 1: And children.
12:52
Speaker 3: In the eighteen twenties, the lines between Saint Nicholas and
12:55
Speaker 3: the sort of scary figure of Santa Claus, a mythological
12:58
Speaker 3: gift giver, began to blur. But how were the Knickerbockers
13:02
Speaker 3: going to unleash this new invention upon the huddled masses.
13:06
Speaker 3: The answer came in eighteen twenty three with the poem
13:09
Speaker 3: we've been talking about in this episode, five hundred and
13:12
Speaker 3: forty two words about a guy named Saint Nicholas terrifying
13:16
Speaker 3: a well to do father by showing up in the
13:17
Speaker 3: middle of the night and instead of demanding the best
13:19
Speaker 3: grog in the house, leaving a bunch of presents, exactly
13:23
Speaker 3: the kind of poem Clement Clark Moore, an eminent New
13:26
Speaker 3: Yorker and friend of the Knickerbockers, would write at precisely
13:29
Speaker 3: that moment. Moore was a Bible scholar. He lived on
13:33
Speaker 3: an estate in Manhattan called Chelsea, which later did in
13:36
Speaker 3: fact become the neighborhood of Chelsea.
13:39
Speaker 5: The New Christmas that Clement Clark Moore was promulgating continued,
13:44
Speaker 5: in a very innocent way, the old social inversion, but
13:49
Speaker 5: in this case it wasn't the rich changing places with
13:53
Speaker 5: the poor. It was the grown ups changing places with
13:58
Speaker 5: the kids. So the children have really replaced the working
14:03
Speaker 5: class in the new Christmas.
14:06
Speaker 3: This was a version of Christmas that worked, and it
14:09
Speaker 3: just got bigger. Clement Moore's estate shrank, but his legend
14:13
Speaker 3: and the legend of his poem grew until the Livingstons
14:17
Speaker 3: caught wind of it. The problem was that, despite all
14:21
Speaker 3: their efforts, no Livingstone had been able to turn up
14:24
Speaker 3: any conclusive, historical or documentary evidence proving beyond a reasonable
14:28
Speaker 3: doubt that Henry Livingston Junior had written the poem. But
14:32
Speaker 3: what if there was another approach? An ancestor of Mary
14:36
Speaker 3: van Dusen's hit upon this idea in a letter from
14:39
Speaker 3: the nineteen twenties. She had been interviewed for an article
14:43
Speaker 3: in the Christian Science Monitor on the authorship question, one
14:46
Speaker 3: of the first times this claim that Henry Livingston Junior
14:49
Speaker 3: had written the poem went national. This, it turned out,
14:53
Speaker 3: was kind of a jarring experience for her, so she
14:55
Speaker 3: wrote to her cousin William, who'd set the whole thing up.
14:59
Speaker 5: Quote.
15:00
Speaker 3: I am writing from my bed. I could not sleep
15:02
Speaker 3: last night, and thinking over our conversation, I got drawn
15:05
Speaker 3: into this cross examination, which was quite inquisitorial in its nature.
15:09
Speaker 3: For the problematical authorship of that poem. It is a
15:13
Speaker 3: very delicate question to handle, and I am not at
15:16
Speaker 3: all in favor of a writer for a Christian science
15:18
Speaker 3: paper handling it. It ought to be touched on, very delicately,
15:22
Speaker 3: and by some man of eminent literary attainments. Wait till
15:26
Speaker 3: you find the fit man to do it. We relatives
15:29
Speaker 3: would only have dirt thrown at us by press and people,
15:32
Speaker 3: for see Moore is a demigod almost in their eyes.
15:36
Speaker 3: Almost a century has this fetish been adored. And I
15:39
Speaker 3: will not have myself or my family mixed up in it.
15:42
Speaker 3: It is too delicate a subject to be dragged and
15:45
Speaker 3: raked about except with great tact and reverence. Wait till
15:49
Speaker 3: you get someone of high literary merit to write about
15:52
Speaker 3: the authorship. Do not make this any but a first
15:55
Speaker 3: class writer. End quote. Without documentary proof, the Livingstones needed
16:01
Speaker 3: to make a stylistic argument that this poem sounded like
16:04
Speaker 3: Livingstin and not like more and only someone of literary
16:09
Speaker 3: attainments could really land it. The Living Stones would wait
16:14
Speaker 3: nearly eighty years until Mary van Dusen came across that website,
16:20
Speaker 3: took up the family quest and found such a scholar.
16:23
Speaker 4: At last, I figured I needed a poetry expert, so
16:28
Speaker 4: I went to the internet and I looked at a
16:32
Speaker 4: archive poetry. I saw Ian Lancashire as the expert of
16:39
Speaker 4: the website and sent to email and I said, I
16:43
Speaker 4: have this problem.
16:44
Speaker 5: What do I do?
16:45
Speaker 4: And he said, you find Don.
16:49
Speaker 3: When we're back. Don the man ab eminent literary attainments
16:53
Speaker 3: and the very best thing the Livingstons could ever hope
16:56
Speaker 3: to find in their stockings. It's the week before Thanksgiving,
17:18
Speaker 3: the year two thousand. A group of people file into
17:21
Speaker 3: a bookstore in Washington, d C. To have their very
17:24
Speaker 3: sense of reality challenged. The event aired on c SPAN.
17:30
Speaker 1: Thanks is great to be with you this evening.
17:32
Speaker 3: This is Don Foster. At the time, he was an
17:35
Speaker 3: English professor at Vassar. He's straight out of Central Casting
17:39
Speaker 3: Laser khakis, tie handsome in a dead poet's Society kind
17:43
Speaker 3: of way. When he makes a particularly devilish point, he
17:46
Speaker 3: shrugs his shoulders almost imperceptibly as his eyes wander to
17:50
Speaker 3: the corner of his great big glasses, as if to say,
17:53
Speaker 3: do I dare to eat a peach. Do I dare
17:56
Speaker 3: disturb the universe?
17:58
Speaker 5: I do.
17:59
Speaker 6: My office is what you would expect in English professor's
18:03
Speaker 6: office to be piled high with student papers and with
18:05
Speaker 6: writings I have studied by poets and play rights. I'm
18:09
Speaker 6: still unknown, but intermixed with the literary text are others
18:13
Speaker 6: by Felon Zealotz or Nameless resent Nix, whose identity your
18:17
Speaker 6: actions were of sufficient interest for someone to ask who
18:21
Speaker 6: wrote this thing?
18:23
Speaker 3: Professor Foster made his name arguing that an anonymously published
18:27
Speaker 3: poem called a Funeral Elegy was actually written by William Shakespeare.
18:32
Speaker 3: He'd used modern computer analysis to argue it so forcefully
18:36
Speaker 3: that anthologies were updated and the press took note. Foster's
18:41
Speaker 3: phone began to.
18:42
Speaker 6: Ring, Professor, do you know that you're going to be
18:44
Speaker 6: on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?
18:45
Speaker 6: And I said, well, Professor, a star was born.
18:49
Speaker 3: Foster practiced a kind of forensics called literary attribution. The
18:53
Speaker 3: premise was that each of us has a style, a
18:56
Speaker 3: kind of fingerprint in the way we write that, if revealed,
18:59
Speaker 3: would prove conclusively that we wrote something. Dusting for that
19:03
Speaker 3: fingerprint relied on two key methodologies. First, computer analysis, where
19:08
Speaker 3: statistic patterns could be detected in an author's work, kind
19:12
Speaker 3: of like large language models. Now a second, an investigator
19:16
Speaker 3: would marshal their own powers of close reading. For instance,
19:20
Speaker 3: just weeks after the Shakespeare story blew Up, Foster was
19:23
Speaker 3: asked to identify the anonymous author of a dish novel
19:26
Speaker 3: called Primary Colors, a thinly veiled account of the Clinton campaign.
19:31
Speaker 3: Foster had a list of suspects. He fed samples of
19:34
Speaker 3: their writing into his computer and began to look closely
19:37
Speaker 3: at how the book was written. The anonymous writer showed
19:41
Speaker 3: a preference for adverbs with l y endings like vaguely.
19:46
Speaker 3: He used dashes to make compound words like triple back
19:49
Speaker 3: over somersault and pander pirouette.
19:51
Speaker 1: He liked zany adjectives.
19:54
Speaker 3: His pros thought Foster revealed certain racial ideas, and all
19:58
Speaker 3: those signs pointed clearly to the journalist Joe Klein. Foster
20:02
Speaker 3: nailed it. Klin eventually fessed up, and this was when
20:06
Speaker 3: things started to get weird for the professor.
20:09
Speaker 6: And at that point prosecutors and defenders and police and
20:14
Speaker 6: other investigators saw in my work application that I had
20:18
Speaker 6: not really thought of myself questioned. Documents in criminal cases
20:22
Speaker 6: and other kinds of anonymous libels Harris mensa were suddenly
20:29
Speaker 6: being sent to me and saying, can you figure out
20:30
Speaker 6: who wrote this?
20:32
Speaker 3: Soon Foster was teaching my day and by night working
20:35
Speaker 3: the Unibomber case, the John Benet Ramsay case, the Anthrax case,
20:40
Speaker 3: and few major news items of the late nineteen nineties
20:43
Speaker 3: were beyond the literary forensics.
20:45
Speaker 6: Single was Don Foster a report at Monica Lewinsky wrote
20:48
Speaker 6: the three page document.
20:49
Speaker 1: So I now go back and ask the question, did
20:52
Speaker 1: she really?
20:53
Speaker 3: The crowd in the bookstore is wrapped around his finger,
20:57
Speaker 3: and that's when he starts talking about Mary van Dusen,
21:01
Speaker 3: the great great great great great granddaughter of Major Henry
21:05
Speaker 3: Livingston junior.
21:06
Speaker 6: I got a phone call in August of nineteen I
21:09
Speaker 6: twenty nine from a woman who said that she thought
21:11
Speaker 6: that her ancestor wrote The Night before Christmas, not Clement
21:15
Speaker 6: Clark Moore.
21:16
Speaker 3: Mary and Don teamed up. She traveled the country searching
21:19
Speaker 3: for proof every version of the Night before Christmas that
21:22
Speaker 3: was ever written. She made a corpus of Henry's work.
21:25
Speaker 3: She got a microfilm machine for her house for her
21:29
Speaker 3: house and read every single newspaper she could find from
21:32
Speaker 3: seventeen seventy five to eighteen thirty. In order to establish
21:36
Speaker 3: a documentary record, she put it all on a website,
21:39
Speaker 3: which ran ultimately to over fifteen thousand pages by her account,
21:43
Speaker 3: in hopes that Don could do his detective work and
21:46
Speaker 3: find an answer, and he did. He began to look
21:50
Speaker 3: into questions of style, just like he did with primary colors.
21:54
Speaker 3: What sort of adjectives were used, what kind of adverbs,
21:57
Speaker 3: what sort of attitudes were expressed? He compared a visit
22:01
Speaker 3: from Saint Nicholas to other poems by Moore and Livingstone.
22:05
Speaker 3: Hundreds of thousands of words had been written on this subject,
22:08
Speaker 3: and we all have all lace to get to. So
22:10
Speaker 3: I'm going to be selective about what we talk about here.
22:13
Speaker 3: But a good example of the case he made is
22:15
Speaker 3: the question of anapestic to trameter, an extremely tedious matter that,
22:22
Speaker 3: of course, is the only thing Malcolm wanted to talk
22:24
Speaker 3: about when I saw him.
22:27
Speaker 2: I want to be in the graduate seminar with you
22:29
Speaker 2: where this poem is taking seriously.
22:31
Speaker 3: Okay, let's let's let's uh, let's break down the formal
22:34
Speaker 3: qualities of this poem. First, there's the meter, which is
22:37
Speaker 3: sort of the crucial thing here. This poem is in
22:40
Speaker 3: a extremely popular meter used for light versus satire called
22:44
Speaker 3: anipestic to trameter.
22:45
Speaker 2: So give it rhythmically, give me lines at show.
22:49
Speaker 3: Twas the night before Christmas went all through the house,
22:51
Speaker 3: not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Da
22:53
Speaker 3: da dum da da dumba so.
22:55
Speaker 2: Dumbda d d.
22:57
Speaker 1: Dump.
22:57
Speaker 3: And you, as a parent might be familiar with this
23:00
Speaker 3: from like all of Doctor SEUs, So like Horton, here's
23:02
Speaker 3: a who on the fifteenth of May and the jungle
23:05
Speaker 3: of newle and the heat of the day and the
23:06
Speaker 3: cool of the pool he was splashing, and you know
23:08
Speaker 3: this kind of like it trips off the tongue. An
23:10
Speaker 3: anipest is aligne. It's two unstressed syllables and a stressed one.
23:15
Speaker 3: So it's dadda dumb, dadda dumb. That's like a dadda dumb.
23:18
Speaker 3: That's an anipest to trameter tetra from the Latin for four.
23:22
Speaker 3: It means there's four of those per line of an
23:24
Speaker 3: anipestic to trameter. It's such an infectious meter. It's easier
23:28
Speaker 3: to memorize and so it can transmit through word of
23:31
Speaker 3: mouth much more easily, which is what happens with this
23:33
Speaker 3: this poem as well. In fact, it is it's it's
23:36
Speaker 3: so good for the spoken word that the way many
23:39
Speaker 3: people probably know it today other than to was the
23:42
Speaker 3: night before Christmas is the way I am by eminem
23:55
Speaker 3: was the night before Christmas, and all through the house
23:59
Speaker 3: it's like it's it just like it hooks you in.
24:03
Speaker 3: So Foster alleged that More was way too serious to
24:07
Speaker 3: be a big anipestic to Trameter. He says that Moore
24:10
Speaker 3: condemned the quote depraved taste in poetry of those who
24:14
Speaker 3: read anipestic satire end quote. In essence, Livingstone was way
24:19
Speaker 3: more likely to write an anipest than More, not least
24:21
Speaker 3: of all because he was just a really fun guy.
24:24
Speaker 6: Here's a little sample of Henry Livingston's verse. This is
24:28
Speaker 6: why he closes one of his many Christmas and New
24:30
Speaker 6: Year's poems, but his time that I bid you goodbye
24:33
Speaker 6: till next year by wishing you happiness, peace and good cheer.
24:36
Speaker 6: And he has the kind of poem after poem after
24:39
Speaker 6: poem in this vein many of them Christmas or New
24:41
Speaker 6: Year's poems.
24:42
Speaker 3: Then he turns his attention to Clement Clark Moore.
24:45
Speaker 6: Clement Clark Moore I thought was pretty Santa Claus kind
24:48
Speaker 6: of guy too, But as it turns out, this is
24:50
Speaker 6: part of the lore that's arisen after his name was
24:52
Speaker 6: associated with the poem.
24:54
Speaker 1: It was quite the curmudgeon.
24:55
Speaker 6: One might even say scrooge, I might even say grinch.
24:59
Speaker 6: He writes things like humble the praise and trifling the regard,
25:03
Speaker 6: whichever way upon the moral barred. And then he goes
25:06
Speaker 6: on to scold women for wearing cosmetics or to unchastised
25:10
Speaker 6: children for being too noisy.
25:12
Speaker 1: Quite a severe man.
25:13
Speaker 3: So, according to Foster, on the one hand, we have
25:16
Speaker 3: a good cheer to the ladies kind of guy, and
25:18
Speaker 3: then there's the grinch scrooge. You could say maybe Moore
25:22
Speaker 3: didn't stand a chance just based on this character assassination.
25:26
Speaker 3: But there was more. In his book, Foster compared the
25:30
Speaker 3: two men further. Henry Livingston Junior fought for independence, Clement
25:34
Speaker 3: Moore was allegedly a slave owner. Livingston was a quote
25:37
Speaker 3: friend of the Indians. Moore descended from the guy who
25:41
Speaker 3: talked the Mohawks into selling Long Island and stylistically even
25:44
Speaker 3: setting aside the slam dunk of the anapestic tetramoner, the
25:47
Speaker 3: poem is Livingston all over the use of the adverbial
25:50
Speaker 3: all as in the children were nestled, all snug in
25:53
Speaker 3: their beds, and then some funny business with the reindeer names.
25:57
Speaker 3: It all looked very, very suspicious. Don Foster, the man
26:04
Speaker 3: of eminent literary attainments, had apparently solved the mystery. At
26:08
Speaker 3: law last, the press went wild.
26:13
Speaker 7: Finally tonight, the mystery of a visit from Saint Nicholas.
26:17
Speaker 7: It has been a holiday tradition since eighteen twenty two.
26:19
Speaker 7: But who really wrote the famous poem?
26:22
Speaker 3: He was in the New York Times twice. He was
26:25
Speaker 3: on network television.
26:27
Speaker 7: Don Foster is sort of a literary sleuth. He was
26:30
Speaker 7: the one who discovered journalist Joe Klein was the anonymous
26:33
Speaker 7: author of the bestseller Primary Colors. He studies the author's
26:38
Speaker 7: words and styles, and in this case he says, Henry
26:42
Speaker 7: Livingston's literary fingerprints are all over. The night before Christmas.
26:47
Speaker 3: Don Foster's argument spread The city of Troy, whose newspaper
26:51
Speaker 3: famously first published the poem, hosted as a kind of
26:54
Speaker 3: Christmas media event, a mock trial in a real courtroom,
26:57
Speaker 3: presided over by a former New York Supreme Court judge
27:00
Speaker 3: and argued by actual lawyers on the question of who
27:03
Speaker 3: wrote the poem. As the Jerry reached a verdict, Jerry
27:06
Speaker 3: and Edgeley decided that the author was Ane for Christmas Is.
27:21
Speaker 3: This prompted the Mayor of Troy to issue a proclamation
27:24
Speaker 3: quote that December twenty third, twenty fourteen is Henry Livingston
27:28
Speaker 3: Junior Day and Troy, New York. Famous musicians have reportedly
27:32
Speaker 3: announced on stage that Henry Livingston Junior is the real
27:35
Speaker 3: author of the poem. The Freaking Poetry Foundation website has
27:39
Speaker 3: a page for Henry Livingston Junior, crediting him as the
27:42
Speaker 3: author of the poem. Unambiguously. This is not ubiquitous, but
27:47
Speaker 3: through Don Foster, Mary van Duzen, and the Livingstons had
27:51
Speaker 3: achieved something her ancestors could only ever have dreamed of.
27:55
Speaker 3: And even if people stopped short of denying Moore's authorship everywhere,
27:59
Speaker 3: people began to question it. After nearly two centuries of injustice,
28:05
Speaker 3: the Livingston family quest was paying.
28:07
Speaker 6: Off to myself come around to the view and that
28:13
Speaker 6: this whole family legend was right in fact has I
28:17
Speaker 6: think finally been vindicated, and Bible professors claimed to this poem,
28:22
Speaker 6: I think is not just highly suspect, but waiting to
28:25
Speaker 6: see what the opposition might have to say.
28:29
Speaker 3: Oh but the opposition was watching, and they didn't like
28:33
Speaker 3: what they saw. A couple of months ago, I visited
28:48
Speaker 3: Seth Kaller, a famed dealer of historic documents in White Plains,
28:52
Speaker 3: New York. Statues of Abraham Lincoln were strewn about the office.
28:56
Speaker 3: Advanced copies of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
28:59
Speaker 3: An original Prince of the Constitution hung on the wall
29:03
Speaker 3: the Constitution I Have a Dream twas the night before Christmas.
29:09
Speaker 8: At the time the controversy erupted because of Don Foster's book,
29:13
Speaker 8: I owned what was thought to be the only copy
29:16
Speaker 8: in private hands, written by Clemency Moore.
29:21
Speaker 3: Caller became embroiled in the authorship.
29:23
Speaker 8: Question, and so a New York Times reporter called me
29:27
Speaker 8: and asked me about it, And you know, I said,
29:30
Speaker 8: I didn't know, let me look into it. And I
29:33
Speaker 8: was totally open minded. I mean, if I had been convinced,
29:36
Speaker 8: I would have changed my description of it and or
29:40
Speaker 8: mentioned the controversy. But the more I got into it,
29:43
Speaker 8: you know, the more upset I got by the dishonesty
29:48
Speaker 8: of the arguments made against Clement Moore. So I kept
29:52
Speaker 8: going even after I thought this is sufficient to you know,
29:56
Speaker 8: make the case.
29:57
Speaker 3: You did send me quite a long document in preparation
30:00
Speaker 3: for this conversation.
30:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I could have sent you a lot more.
30:03
Speaker 3: Caller began to go through the claims in Don Foster's book,
30:06
Speaker 3: and he soon found that most of them, We're deeply suspicious.
30:11
Speaker 3: The comparable phraseology that table confused me. Would you? Would
30:14
Speaker 3: you explain the origin of that table?
30:17
Speaker 1: Let me find it?
30:19
Speaker 3: Caller got out of binder stuffed with papers. Nobody is
30:22
Speaker 3: taking this matter lightly. In fact, we spent an entire
30:25
Speaker 3: afternoon going through this. Let's stick to the big ticket
30:29
Speaker 3: items today first style. More wouldn't write like this, but
30:33
Speaker 3: Caller showed me a chart comparing parts of the poem
30:36
Speaker 3: with other poems More had written.
30:39
Speaker 8: Here's another from another one of his writings, Twas an
30:42
Speaker 8: autumnal morn, celestial bright, the all Snug and from something else.
30:49
Speaker 8: In The Snug and Tidy Night before Christmas, he talks
30:52
Speaker 8: about visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.
30:54
Speaker 1: One of the rhymes in Night.
30:56
Speaker 8: Before Christmas is a clatter and matter, and in another
31:00
Speaker 8: poem is.
31:02
Speaker 1: Words, feelings, thought phrases.
31:04
Speaker 8: These would all be evidence that More could have written
31:09
Speaker 8: the Night Before Christmas, and in fact did write the
31:11
Speaker 8: Night Before Christmas, as opposed to you know, just making
31:15
Speaker 8: the arguments that he couldn't have because he didn't use
31:17
Speaker 8: these for these words.
31:19
Speaker 3: So maybe Livingston as author can't be proven stylistically, But
31:23
Speaker 3: that's not all he and his colleagues found. The historical
31:26
Speaker 3: argument about when Henry would have needed to write the
31:29
Speaker 3: poem in order to be the author didn't line.
31:31
Speaker 8: Up either, But the fact that all of the stories
31:34
Speaker 8: that the Livingston family have told can be actually disproven.
31:39
Speaker 8: You know, oh, was taken by a nanny, and then
31:42
Speaker 8: you prove that, well, then nanny wasn't there for another
31:45
Speaker 8: eight years.
31:46
Speaker 3: Also suspect Foster's finding that Moore was a humorless scrooge,
31:51
Speaker 3: which was often a clear case of taking something More
31:53
Speaker 3: had written out of context.
31:55
Speaker 8: What I found wasn't just that it was misinterpreted, but
32:01
Speaker 8: that it was elited to the point where if you
32:05
Speaker 8: just read the full sentence, it actually proves the opposite
32:10
Speaker 8: of what is being used to.
32:14
Speaker 1: Argue Now.
32:15
Speaker 3: I can't know the mind of Don Foster, but there
32:18
Speaker 3: were at least a few examples of his attributions not
32:21
Speaker 3: exactly panning out. A couple of years after his book
32:24
Speaker 3: Author Unknown came out, he retracted his famous claim that
32:28
Speaker 3: Shakespeare had written the Funeralogy, under mounting skepticism, and after
32:32
Speaker 3: he wrote an article seeming to suggest an innocent government
32:35
Speaker 3: scientist was responsible for sending the anthrax letters after September eleventh,
32:40
Speaker 3: he was sued for libel, settled for some undisclosed amount
32:43
Speaker 3: of money, and went back to being predominantly a vasser
32:46
Speaker 3: English professor. I had hoped to interview him for this story,
32:50
Speaker 3: but he declined to speak with me through a colleague.
32:53
Speaker 3: He'll keep Christmas in his way, and I'll keep it
32:55
Speaker 3: in mind. But in my view, Foster's argument has done
32:59
Speaker 3: a grave injustice to Clement Clark Moore that we, the
33:02
Speaker 3: staff of Revisionist History and associates in the Rare Documents trade,
33:06
Speaker 3: refused to leave unchallenged.
33:08
Speaker 8: And his book Arthur Unknown is still referred to and
33:13
Speaker 8: still used by, you know, people who are looking into it.
33:16
Speaker 8: And then so many other reporters go with it as
33:21
Speaker 8: the story if he said she said that. I don't
33:24
Speaker 8: blame the family as much as I blame some of
33:27
Speaker 8: the scholars who should know better.
33:29
Speaker 1: But it does still bother.
33:32
Speaker 8: Me, Like if I bring up or the last time
33:35
Speaker 8: I did was years ago, bring up the idea of
33:37
Speaker 8: a museum exhibit and Clement Moore's authorship. Some accept it outright,
33:42
Speaker 8: but others have been, well, we have to be careful,
33:45
Speaker 8: we have to talk about the controversy. No, you know,
33:49
Speaker 8: you have to acknowledge that there was one, but you
33:52
Speaker 8: should not pretend that it's actually real.
33:56
Speaker 3: Christmas is all about your dreams coming true. Maybe Foster
34:00
Speaker 3: tried to do that for Mary, But to my mind,
34:04
Speaker 3: in the end, I think what they set in motion
34:06
Speaker 3: was a satisfying and to the mystery, it just wasn't
34:10
Speaker 3: the conclusion they'd hoped for.
34:11
Speaker 4: It's fine with me that you come to a different
34:14
Speaker 4: position than I do. I don't ever say flatly that
34:20
Speaker 4: Henry wrote the poem. I say, I believe that Henry
34:24
Speaker 4: wrote the poem, and here's the data, and make up
34:28
Speaker 4: your own mind. So if you use it to come
34:33
Speaker 4: to a different conclusion than I do, that's fine. At
34:38
Speaker 4: least you examine the issue and you feel peace in
34:45
Speaker 4: yourself at the answer you come to.
34:51
Speaker 2: Then, was there was there one bit of evidence set
34:54
Speaker 2: for you really sealed the case.
34:58
Speaker 3: Yeah. This whole argument against Clenen Clark Moore relies on
35:03
Speaker 3: the idea that he's a scrooge who would never write
35:07
Speaker 3: about Christmas. He would never never write light verse, never
35:10
Speaker 3: write about fairies, certainly never write about Santa Claus and Christmas.
35:13
Speaker 3: And these researchers found not just one, but two effectively
35:19
Speaker 3: Christmas poems by Clement Clark Moore that pre date or
35:24
Speaker 3: are in tight sequence with a Visit from Saint Nicholas.
35:29
Speaker 3: So the first is a letter called from Saint Nicholas,
35:31
Speaker 3: which is literally in the voice of Santa Claus to
35:34
Speaker 3: Clemic Clark Moore's kid, which I guess, true to his haters,
35:36
Speaker 3: is about why she's not getting any presents that year,
35:39
Speaker 3: though it is very sweet and crucially it's an anithestic determiner.
35:43
Speaker 3: But this one is the one that I actually really love.
35:48
Speaker 3: The Melville scholar Scott Norsworthy thinks that this poem and
35:54
Speaker 3: a Visit from Saint Nicholas were written at the same time.
35:58
Speaker 3: There was a snowstorm in New York on December twenty first.
36:01
Speaker 3: Was a Saturday in eighteen twenty two, Throughoute this poem
36:05
Speaker 3: called lines, written after a snowstorm.
36:09
Speaker 1: I'll read it to you.
36:10
Speaker 3: Come, children, dear, and look around. Behold how soft and
36:14
Speaker 3: light the silent snow has clad the ground in robes
36:17
Speaker 3: of purest white. The trees seem decked by fairy hand
36:20
Speaker 3: nor knead their native green, and every breeze appears to
36:24
Speaker 3: stand all hushed to view the seam. You wonder how
36:27
Speaker 3: the snows are made that dance upon the air, as
36:30
Speaker 3: if from purer worlds they strayed so lightly and so fair.
36:35
Speaker 3: Perhaps they are the summer flowers in northern stars, that
36:38
Speaker 3: bloom wafted away from icy bowers to cheer our winter's gloom.
36:43
Speaker 3: Perhaps they are feathers of a race of birds that
36:45
Speaker 3: live away in some cold, dreary, wintry place, far from
36:49
Speaker 3: the sun's warm ray and clouds. Perhaps are downy beds
36:53
Speaker 3: on which the winds repose, who, when they rouse their
36:56
Speaker 3: slumbering heads, shake down the feathery snows. But see, my darlings,
37:01
Speaker 3: while we stay and gaze with fond delight the fairy scene.
37:04
Speaker 3: Soon fades away and mocks our raptured sight, and let
37:08
Speaker 3: this fleet eating vision teach truth. You soon must know
37:12
Speaker 3: that all the joys we here can reach are transient
37:14
Speaker 3: as the snow.
37:16
Speaker 1: They say something.
37:20
Speaker 3: Christmas is a made up holiday. The core of it
37:24
Speaker 3: is these weird social inversions that last for a day
37:27
Speaker 3: and then melt like the new fallen snow. In that sense,
37:31
Speaker 3: I think it's easy to see why the story that
37:33
Speaker 3: Henry Livingston Junior actually wrote this poem gets retold so often.
37:38
Speaker 3: It's another Christmas ee inversion, one about as old as
37:42
Speaker 3: modern Christmas itself, just another story about a thing that's
37:46
Speaker 3: not as it seems. Fat men in velvet robes sliding
37:50
Speaker 3: down thin chimneys, everything you ever wanted under a tree
37:54
Speaker 3: that's indoors, and your great great great great great grandfathers
38:00
Speaker 3: forgotten roll in inventing Christmas. I don't believe it, but
38:06
Speaker 3: then again tis the season. Revisionist History is produced by
38:16
Speaker 3: me Bennatt of Haffrey, with Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan.
38:21
Speaker 3: Our editor is Karen Schakergie fact checking by Onica Robbins.
38:25
Speaker 3: Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke
38:30
Speaker 3: Lehmand engineering by David Herman at Good Studios and Nina
38:34
Speaker 3: Bird Lawrence. Original music was composed, arranged, and recorded by
38:39
Speaker 3: Luis Gara, mixing and mastering bar Marcelo di Olivera. I
38:44
Speaker 3: have stood on the shoulders of giants for this absurd episode.
38:47
Speaker 3: All credit to the scholars and writers who made this possible,
38:50
Speaker 3: Scott Norsworthy of the Melvileana Blog, Tom Jerman, and Justin Fox.
38:56
Speaker 3: To our friends in Troy, the incomparable Duncan Crairie and
38:59
Speaker 3: city historian Kathy Shehan. If I've left you unconvinced about
39:04
Speaker 3: Moore's authorship, you can read the latest salvo from the
39:06
Speaker 3: Livingstonians in the book Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas
39:10
Speaker 3: by Professor MacDonald P.
39:11
Speaker 1: Jackson.
39:12
Speaker 3: Just be sure to read Scott Norseworthy's response to it
39:15
Speaker 3: on the Melvilliana Blog right afterwards. From Revisionist History, Happy
39:22
Speaker 3: holidays and we'll see you all in the new year.