New York · 1823 to 1920
Did Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed the poem in 1844, write the fifty-six lines the Troy Sentinel printed without a name on 23 December 1823, or did Henry Livingston Jr., for whom his descendants have claimed them since 1879?
What happened. Two days before Christmas 1823 the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in Troy, New York, printed fifty-six lines of verse headed "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas", with a note from its editor, Orville L. Holley, saying he did not know who wrote them. The poem (it begins "'Twas the night before Christmas") gave St. Nicholas his reindeer, his sleigh and his descent by the chimney, and it circulated for thirteen years without an author's name; in December 1836 a New York anthology printed it under the name of Clement Clarke Moore, a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, and in 1844 Moore said in print that he had written it years before to amuse his children. The Poughkeepsie Journal, a newspaper in Poughkeepsie, some seventy miles down the Hudson from Troy, had printed the poem anonymously in January 1828, six weeks before Henry Livingston Jr., a local landowner, surveyor and writer of light verse in the poem's metre, died there; nobody in his house is recorded as saying anything about it. From 1879 his descendants wrote, and from 1899 said in public, that he had read the poem to his children years before 1823, that his manuscript had burned in a house fire in Wisconsin, and that a Poughkeepsie paper had printed it before Troy did; neither the manuscript nor that printing has been found.
Why it is a mystery. For Moore there is a sequence of dated documents: the Sentinel's editor wrote in January 1829 that the author was a New York City scholar and recalled in 1836 (a statement known only in transcription) that he had learned within months of the printing that the author was "a professor in one of our colleges", a student's diary of 1834 describes a costume made "according to the description of Prof Moore in his poem", and Moore supplied the poem to the 1836 anthology, claimed it in 1844 and wrote out signed copies until his death in 1863. On the other side, he said nothing for twenty years, no manuscript from before 1823 survives for either man, and most of his other verse is grave and iambic (the da-DUM of most English verse), whereas the poem is comic and anapestic (da-da-DUM), a metre he used in only four other surviving poems; for Livingston there are two things, the family's memory and the poem's manner: the memory was first written down in 1879, fifty-six years after the printing, the relatives who recorded it disagree about the date, the child and the newspaper, and, as the family said in 1900, no document from his lifetime supports it, while the manner matches the comic anapestic verse he habitually wrote. Don Foster, an English professor at Vassar College, argued the case for Livingston in his book Author Unknown (2000), and MacDonald P. Jackson, a New Zealand scholar of Shakespearean authorship, tested the claim statistically in a book of 2016: on his counts of common words and speech sounds the poem scored with Livingston, and in 2017, answering Scott Norsworthy, an independent scholar who had reviewed that book on his blog Melvilliana, Jackson wrote that the documents favoured Moore and the text favoured Livingston, and that he could not reconcile the two; Moore has been defended on the documents by Stephen Nissenbaum, a historian of the American Christmas, in 2001, by Seth Kaller, a dealer in historical documents, in 2004, and by Norsworthy. Tom Jerman, a retired lawyer, in a 2023 book, and Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in tests for Bloomberg in 2023, are reported to have found for Moore by computation.
How it was judged. Every dated document from 1823, the year of the printing, to 1920, when the family's claim reached a national magazine, was collected and marked as checked against a scan or known only from a transcription, and the stylometry, which counts a writer's habits, that is, how often particular common words, letter sequences (character n-grams) and speech sounds (phonemes) appear, each kind of count making one feature set, was rebuilt on corpora (collections of text) built for the report: 46 poems by Moore (the 29 in Poems, the collection he published in 1844, proofread against a scan of it, and 17 manuscript poems taken from the transcriptions on henrylivingston.com, a website kept by a Livingston descendant), 66 by Livingston (also from that site's transcriptions, not checked against originals) and 2,756 by 32 other poets of the period (the control corpus, used to test the methods), with every method tested first on poems whose author is known. Standard profile tests, which compare a text with a profile of each man's habits built from everything he wrote, sort the known poems 80 to 89 percent correctly, but the word and letter-sequence tests attribute Moore's own four comic anapestic poems to Livingston most or all of the time (0 to 2 of 4 correct), because the tests learn the metre along with the author; tests built from the anapestic verse of both men only (the metre-matched design) sort Moore's four correctly and put the poem with Moore, inside the range of his four and beyond 94 to 100 percent of the sixteen 56-line samples of Livingston's anapestic verse on every word and letter-sequence feature set (speech sounds are a tie, and four Moore poems are a thin base). Against twenty-nine other poets of the period neither man can be verified as the author at all, and the stylometry is close to even and weak in both directions, so the verdict rests on the documents: nothing written in Livingston's lifetime, or for fifty years after it, connects him with the poem, the editor who printed it placed the author in New York City eleven months after Livingston died, and Moore is put at about 85 percent, Livingston at 12, someone else at 3. A Poughkeepsie newspaper printing of the poem from before 1823, or a dated document from before 1844 in which any Livingston mentions the poem, would overturn it.
Clement Clarke Moore wrote it. The confidence is about 85 percent: Moore 85, Henry Livingston Jr. 12, someone else 3.
The documents carry the verdict, and most of them were read in transcription, including Holley's 1836 statement on which the earliest dating of Moore's authorship rests; no manuscript from before 1823 survives on either side. The stylometry is weak both ways and every metre-matched result rests on four Moore poems, so the 85 percent is a reasoned judgment, conditional on the weights set out in the full report, which is linked from this page; no calculation produced it.
The dated documents point to Moore from 1829, and by the Troy Sentinel editor's own later account from 1824. The editor wrote in 1836, in a statement known only in transcription, that within months of printing the poem in December 1823 he had learned its author was "a professor in one of our colleges"; in January 1829 he described him in print as a New York City scholar and writer; the diary of a student at Moore's seminary calls it Prof Moore's poem in 1834; it was printed under Moore's name from 1836, in a book to which he supplied it; he claimed it in a public letter in 1844 and wrote out signed copies for the rest of his life. The poem was printed anonymously in Livingston's own town in January 1828, six weeks before he died, and nobody in his house is recorded as saying anything: an argument from silence that carries weight because the poem was printed in the family's own town, though the family may have known and left no trace. The first Livingston claim on paper is a daughter's letter of 4 March 1879 (year assigned from internal evidence); in 1900 the family said it had no proof and no manuscript, and its accounts contradict each other on the date, the child and the newspaper.
The stylometric case for Livingston (MacDonald P. Jackson, 2016) reproduces on corpora built for the report: on Jackson's word and phoneme tests the poem scores in Livingston's range and above all four of Moore's surviving anapestic poems. But standard profile tests trained on each man's whole output file those four Moore poems under Livingston's name most or all of the time (0 to 2 of 4 correct), and Jackson's own lists put one or two of the four on Livingston's side. Build the reference profiles from the anapestic verse of both men only and the poem falls within the range of Moore's four anapests and beyond 94 to 100 percent of the sixteen 56-line samples cut from Livingston's twenty-three anapestic poems on every word and character feature set; the phoneme set is a tie, and four Moore poems are a thin base. Against twenty-nine other poets of the period, neither man can be verified as the author of a 545-word comic poem.
The documents alone put Moore at 85 to 90 percent; the verdict takes the lower end because the stylometric designs disagree with one another, rest on four Moore poems, and Jackson's word test still points the other way. The case for Livingston at its strongest: several of his children, five by the family's own count in 1900, are reported to have remembered him reading the poem, a daughter said so in her own hand in the letter dated to 1879, Livingston habitually wrote comic anapestic tetrameter, the poem's metre, and Moore rarely did, and Jackson's tests, run on the largest corpora available in 2016, placed the poem with Livingston on each of his main measures. The family memory is real but late, its written form contradicts itself, and the family said in 1900 it had no proof; Moore did write comic anapests, four survive, and the poem lies among them on metre-matched tests; and if Holley's 1836 statement is accurate, the poem was being called Moore's in 1824, within a year of the printing, whereas the family's account of 1900, in which a governess from the Livingston household carried a copy with no author's name on it to the Moore family, requires that it came to be taken for Moore's own only decades later.
The documents alone put Moore at 85 to 90 percent and the verdict takes the lower end; the remainder goes to the family being right (several of Livingston's children are reported to have believed it) and to a third author (two other men, John W. Curtis, a young clergyman, and the artist Joseph Wood, were credited in Moore's lifetime, each by someone else after the man's death). The stylometry, weighed both ways, is close to even: whole-corpus profile tests give Livingston a likelihood ratio (how many times more probable the result is if he wrote the poem than if Moore did) of at most about two, metre-matched tests give Moore roughly three with wide uncertainty from a base of four poems, and Jackson's word and phoneme tests give Livingston about two each (less on phonemes once the metre shift is taken off: among the 14 control poets who wrote in both metres, anapestic verse scores 5.5 points more "Livingston" on the phoneme test than the same poet's other verse); the ratios are not combined into one number, but taken together, with all of them weak by the impostors test, they are close to even, so the stylometry neither raises nor lowers the documentary figure by much.
The dated documents from 1823 to 1920 were collected and marked as checked against a scan or known only from a transcription. Corpora, collections of text, were built: 46 poems by Clement Clarke Moore, 29 from his Poems of 1844 proofread against a scan and 17 manuscript poems from henrylivingston.com, a website kept by a Livingston descendant; 66 by Henry Livingston Jr., from that site, not checked against originals; and 2,756 by 32 other poets. No manuscript was examined, and most documents were read in transcription, including the 1836 statement by Orville L. Holley, the editor who printed the poem, on which the earliest dating of Moore's authorship rests.
Stylometry, which counts a writer's habits, how often common words, letter sequences (character n-grams) and speech sounds (phonemes) appear, was rebuilt, and every method was tested first on poems whose author is known. Profile tests, which compare a text with a profile of each man's habits built from everything he wrote, sort the known poems 80 to 89 percent correctly but mostly attribute Moore's four anapestic poems to Livingston, because they learn the metre along with the author; so tests were built from the anapestic verse of both men only, the metre-matched design. The General Impostors method, a standard check of whether a candidate can be verified as an author, was run against 29 poets.
Figure 1 plots, for the 300 most frequent words, the margin (the distance to Livingston's profile minus the distance to Moore's) of each of the 132 samples of 56 lines, in four rows by man and metre, against references built from the anapestic verse of both men only; positive means nearer Moore, and the vertical line is the poem, which lies among Moore's anapests and beyond 94 percent of Livingston's. Figure 2 repeats this on character 4-grams, and the poem passes every one of Livingston's anapests. Figure 3 gives the impostors scores on character 4-grams: Moore's own samples score 0.73 as candidate, Livingston's own 0.44, and the poem 0.003 for Moore and 0.000 for Livingston, so neither man is verified.
The word-list and phoneme-pair tests of MacDonald P. Jackson, the scholar whose 2016 book found for Livingston, which score a text by its share of the words, and of the adjacent sound pairs, that each man favoured, reproduce on the new corpora, with the poem above all four of Moore's anapests, but by margins about the size of the spread of scores among 56-line samples by a single author, and the phoneme test is shifted toward Livingston by anapestic metre itself. Taken together the stylometry is close to even and weak in both directions, and it neither raises nor lowers the documentary figure by much.
The verdict rests on the documents: nothing written in Livingston's lifetime, or for fifty years after it, connects him with the poem; it was printed in his own town while he was alive and nobody in his house is recorded as reacting; and the editor who printed it placed the author in New York City eleven months after Livingston died. Moore is put at about 85 percent, Livingston at 12 and someone else at 3; the figures are judgments on the report's weights, and no calculation produced them. A Poughkeepsie printing from before 1823, or a dated document from before 1844 in which any Livingston mentions the poem, would overturn it.
Already established by others. The documentary picture is Scott Norsworthy's: Moore's 1844 letter in the New York American, a newspaper (re-read here from the scan, in which the last digit of the first year Moore gives is smudged), Holley's 1836 statement (read only in Norsworthy's transcription), the pre-1844 attributions, and his identification of T. W. C. Moore, a kinsman of Moore's by marriage who sent one of Moore's handwritten copies to the New-York Historical Society in 1862, as Livingston's first cousin once removed, so that a relative of Livingston's was vouching for Moore's authorship in 1862; Seth Kaller (2004) and Stephen Nissenbaum (2001) had set out the record before him. Foster's "all" marker (his claim that the poem's use of "all" as an intensifier was a Livingston habit) fails on these corpora, the two men's rates being equal. Tom Jerman (2023) and Shlomo Argamon (2023), known here only through secondary accounts, are reported to point the same way as the metre-matched result; neither was replicated. Jackson's own numbers reproduce.
What historians have said. The traditional attribution is to Moore. Livingston's descendants have disputed it since 1899, Don Foster since 2000 (Author Unknown) and MacDonald P. Jackson since 2016, whose statistical tests on the poem's words and sounds placed it with Livingston; Jackson's position in 2017 was that the external evidence favours Moore, the internal evidence favours Livingston, and the question may never be settled. Stephen Nissenbaum (2001), Seth Kaller (2004) and Scott Norsworthy have defended Moore on the documents, and Tom Jerman (2023) and Shlomo Argamon (2023) are reported to have found for Moore by computation.
The verdict agrees with the traditional attribution. What it changes is the reading of Jackson's numbers: his Livingston-favouring results are real, but they are close to what any anapestic poem by Moore produces on tests trained on his mostly iambic output. On word and character features the metre-matched design places the poem with Moore; only Jackson's word-list test survives the metre check, and it favours Livingston by a margin the test's own noise nearly covers. Taken together the stylometry is close to even and weak in both directions, and it neither raises nor lowers the documentary figure by much.