[This December we commemorate the 200th anniversary of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (well, maybe we do—see Monday’s post!). That was one of many Christmas stories I read to my sons when they were young, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy it and four other such holiday classics!]
On an
important AmericanStudies takeaway from the controversy over the classic Christmas
poem’s authorship.
To be
clear, and so you don’t think I was the most obnoxiously academic Dad ever, I
didn’t include thorny authorship debates when I shared “A Visit from St.
Nicholas” with the boys. We focused on all the elements that have made this
poem such an enduring hit since its 1823 publication: the legendary opening
line that has eventually given the poem its new title “’Twas the Night Before
Christmas”; the rhyming couplets and rhythm that move reader and audience alike
through the rest of the poem’s structure after that opening; the naming of the
reindeer which has become such an iconic part of the Santa Claus mythos (as
have other aspects of this poem to be sure). And at the risk of getting on the
naughty list, I’ll note that the boys’ favorite moment was an invented one I
stole from my own Dad’s reading of the poem to me: revising the second line in
the couplet “And laying a finger aside of his nose,/And giving a nod, up the
chimney he rose;” to “He pulled out a booger as long as a hose.” What can I
say, boys will be boys, at all ages.
So like
generations have before us, my sons and I greatly enjoyed our own annual rendition
of “Visit.” But from its very first appearance, as the anonymously authored poem
“Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” published in the Troy, New
York Sentinel on December 23rd,
1823, the question of who created those iconic lines has been an uncertain one.
It remained publicly anonymous for 14 years, until the professor and author
Clement Clarke Moore claimed
authorship in 1837; Moore subsequently included “Visit” in an 1844
collection of his poetry. But over the centuries an alternate theory has
emerged: that fellow New Yorker (and distant relative of Moore’s by marriage) Henry Livingston Jr. was the author
of the original poem. As you might expect for a work as enduring and popular as
this poem, a small cottage industry has developed among scholars making the case for one
or the other
of these men as the first author, and I’m not going to pretend to be able
to weigh in with the knowledge nor the authority that those folks have brought
to their works.
Whoever
penned that December 1823 poem, however, it’s important to note that it
appeared anonymously in a daily newspaper, and not even one in a major city and
literary hub like Boston (or, increasingly
in that era, New York, where both Moore and Livingston spent their lives,
literary and otherwise). Poetry in early 19th century America was a
profoundly public and communal enterprise, not quite akin to the oral traditions
of Homer and his ilk but certainly not yet consistently the domain of iconic
individual authors that it would become and largely remains (although the first
American professional poets were just beginning to ply their trade in this
period). That collective tradition could be found in most every American
community, and was most commonly shared in mass media like newspapers. It was
thus far from abnormal for a poem to appear without a named author, although of
course it’s particularly apt that that was the case for this specific poem,
which so fully established some of the collective images and narratives around
Santa Claus and Christmas that have endured for the two centuries since. To all
a good night indeed.
Next Christmas
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Christmas or holiday readings you’d share?
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