# The modern scholarly debate over the authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (Clement Clarke Moore vs. Henry Livingston Jr.)

Compiled from full texts and excerpts saved under `docs/sources/` (each file carries its source URL on line 1). This document is meant to let a new stylometric/documentary study engage the existing literature precisely: who claimed what, on what evidence, who answered, and what remains open.

**Verification legend used throughout**

- **[FULL]** I read the complete text (copy saved in `docs/sources/`).
- **[EXCERPT]** I read only part (abstract, quoted passages, selected pages); the rest is inferred.
- **[SECONDARY]** I did not see the work; what is reported comes from other scholars' quotations or summaries (named in each case). Treat page numbers and wording as second-hand.
- **[NOT RETRIEVED]** known to exist; content not seen.

Where I say "Foster says", "Nickell says" or "Jackson's book says" the reader should check the tag: Foster's *Author Unknown*, Nickell's *Manuscripts* articles, Jackson's 2016 book and 2017 *Style* article, Jerman's 2023 book, and McColl's 2022 book were all **[SECONDARY]** or **[EXCERPT]** in this survey (lending-library and paywalled copies could not be opened from this environment). Jackson's own two 2017 replies to Norsworthy, however, were read in full and restate most of his book's numbers and arguments in his own words.

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## 0. The state of the question in one page

1. The poem was printed anonymously in the *Troy Sentinel* on 23 December 1823 with an editorial headnote by Orville L. Holley ("We know not to whom we are indebted..."). Holley hinted at Moore in the *Sentinel* of 20 January 1829 ("a gentleman of *more* merit as a scholar and a writer than many of more noisy pretensions") and stated in the *Ontario Repository and Freeman* of 28 December 1836 that "not many months afterwards we learnt that they came from the pen of a most accomplished scholar and estimable man, a professor in one of our colleges." Moore's name was attached in print from 31 December 1836 (*New York American*) and January 1837 (*American Monthly Magazine*; Hoffman's *New-York Book of Poetry*, to which Moore supplied four poems). Moore publicly claimed the poem in a letter dated 27 February 1844 (*New York American*, 1 March 1844) and printed it in his *Poems* (1844); he wrote out at least four autograph copies (1853, 1856, 1860, 1862), the last accompanied by a cover letter from T. W. C. Moore (15 March 1862) giving the composition story. [FULL transcriptions of all of these in Norsworthy's posts; see A1.]

2. Livingston (1748-1828) never claimed the poem. His descendants' belief that he read it to his children "about 1804 or 1805" (Henry Livingston of Babylon, 1900), "1808" (Jeanne Denig reporting Eliza Brewer Livingston, 1917-18) or "between 1780 and 1800" (Cornelia Goodrich, 1900) is documented in letters beginning 4 March 1879 (Eliza Livingston Thompson Lansing) and was first argued publicly in 1899-1900 (Long Island newspaper letters), 1919 (W. S. Thomas), 1920 (Tryon; West). The manuscript "with many corrections" is said to have burned in Wisconsin in 1847-48 (Babylon Henry) or 1859 (Van Deusen timeline). [FULL: Thomas 1919; Tryon 1920; West 1920; Stevenson 1923; MacCracken 1958; witness-letter transcriptions on henrylivingston.com.]

3. Don Foster's *Author Unknown* (2000) revived the claim with character arguments against Moore and stylistic arguments for Livingston; it was answered by Nissenbaum (2001), Lowe (2000), Nickell (2002-03) and Kaller (2004). Foster's most concrete charge (the Merino-sheep "plagiarism" inscription) was shown not to be in Moore's hand. [Nissenbaum FULL; Kaller FULL; NYT report FULL; Foster SECONDARY.]

4. MacDonald P. Jackson's *Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"?* (McFarland, 2016) applied computational stylistics (phoneme pairs, high- and medium-high-frequency words, articles, attributive adjectives, rhymes, trigrams, favourite expressions) and concluded that every test places the poem with Livingston's verse, while conceding that the external evidence, "taken at face value, favours Moore". A follow-up article (*Style* 51.4, 2017) tested Livingston against a corpus of his periodical contemporaries and again associated the poem with Livingston. [Book SECONDARY/EXCERPT; Jackson's 2017 replies FULL; *Style* abstract only.]

5. Since 2016 the documentary case for Moore has been strengthened (Norsworthy's discovery of the 1844 *New York American* letter, the ~25 pre-1844 printed attributions, Holley's 1836 statement, Moore's second anonymous *Troy Sentinel* poem of 20 February 1824, and the identification of T. W. C. Moore as Livingston's first cousin once removed), and two independent computational tests have pointed the other way from Jackson: Tom Jerman's JGAAP runs (16 of 17 tests for Moore, 2023) and Shlomo Argamon's random-feature-subset similarity tests for Bloomberg (December 2023: "Moore is much more likely to be the author than Livingston"). No peer-reviewed replication of Jackson's tests by a third party was found; no Livingston-side rebuttal of Argamon or Jerman was found; Jackson himself wrote in 2017 that he "still cannot reconcile the external evidence for Moore's authorship ... with the internal evidence for Livingston's" and that "more research is needed."

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## A. Annotated bibliography

### A1. Primary documents that the scholars argue about (with where each is transcribed)

| Item | Where I saw it | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| *Troy Sentinel*, 23 Dec 1823, "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" with Holley's headnote | Norsworthy, Melvilliana 8 Apr 2019 [FULL transcription from NYS Historic Newspapers, `tts18231223-01.1.3`] | Reads "Dunder and Blixem", "I sprung from the bed", "jirk", "As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly". Jackson's book transcription has two small errors here (Norsworthy addendum 2019). |
| *Troy Sentinel*, 20 Jan 1829 (Holley's "more merit" hint, answering the *New York Courier* of 1 Jan 1829) | Quoted in Stevenson 1923, West 1920, Kaller, Norsworthy [FULL quotations; original via Weise, *Troy's One Hundred Years* (1891), and NYS Historic Newspapers] | Poem itself clipped from the Troy Library copy. |
| *Ontario Repository and Freeman* (Canandaigua), 28 Dec 1836 (Holley: learned the author "not many months afterwards") | Norsworthy 1 Feb 2016 [FULL transcription]; reprinted *Auburn Journal*, 4 Jan 1837 | First cited in the authorship literature by Norsworthy (2016). |
| *New York American*, 31 Dec 1836 ("A Visit from St. Nicholas.--By Clement C. Moore"); *American Monthly Magazine*, Jan 1837 ("never ... before under the name of the real author--CLEMENT C. MOORE"); Hoffman, *New-York Book of Poetry* (Dearborn, 1837) with four Moore poems | Norsworthy 8 Aug 2018 [FULL list of ~25 attributions 1836-43] | Moore's 1844 letter: "I gave the publisher several pieces, among which was the 'Visit'". |
| Francis P. Lee diary, New Year's Eve 1834 (Morristown NJ fair: "a figure called St. Nicholas who was robed in fur, and dressed according to the description of Prof. Moore in his poem") | Cited by Nissenbaum, *Battle for Christmas* (1996) p. 345 n. 85; Norsworthy 2018/2025 [SECONDARY] | Earliest private attribution to Moore yet cited (Lee was Moore's Hebrew student). |
| *Daily National Intelligencer*, 25 Dec 1843 (poem "written by JOSEPH WOOD, artist"), 28 Dec 1843 (correction by "C."), 6 Mar 1844 (reply to Charles King) | Norsworthy 31 Oct 2016 [SECONDARY], 8 Aug 2018 [FULL quotation of 28 Dec letter] | The first false posthumous attribution; the trigger for Moore's 1844 letters. |
| Moore to Norman Tuttle, 23 Feb 1844 (lost) and Tuttle to Moore, 26 Feb 1844, written on the verso of the 1830 *Sentinel* broadside bearing Moore's autograph corrections (Museum of the City of New York 54.331.17A-B) | Kaller [FULL description]; Norsworthy [FULL quotation of opening]; Van Deusen timeline; Jackson (pp. 173-4, SECONDARY) | Tuttle: the copy came from Sarah Sackett; he did not then know the author but "has since been informed" it was Moore. Foster's "coast is clear" letter (Foster p. 271, quoted by Jackson). |
| Moore to Charles King, dated 27 Feb 1844, printed *New York American*, 1 Mar 1844 | Norsworthy 24 Jan 2017 [FULL transcription from NYPL microfilm] | "some lines, describing a visit from St. Nicholas, which I wrote many years ago, I think somewhere between 1823 [smudged; possibly 1822] and 1824, not for publication, but to amuse my children ... I feel it incumbent on me not to remain silent, while so bold a claim ... is laid to my literary property". Discovered by Norsworthy, January 2017; acknowledged by Jackson (2017 reply; *Style* 2017 p. 491). |
| Moore, *Poems* (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1844), pp. 124-27, preface dated March 1844 | Quoted in Stevenson, Patterson, Norsworthy [EXCERPT] | Reads "Donder and Blitzen", "Prancer and Vixen!", "As dry leaves". |
| Moore autograph copies: Aug 1853 (Strong Museum), Mar 1856 for Oscar T. Keeler (Huntington), 1860 ("the Kaller copy", Christie's 1997, $211,000), 13 Mar 1862 (New-York Historical Society) | Kaller App. D [FULL]; NYT 2000; NYHS blog 22 Dec 2025 [FULL] | Norsworthy (2017 update): "make that five, counting the Chilton copy"; per my earlier notes a fifth ("Chilton") copy was offered at Christie's in Dec 2024 [SECONDARY]. Nickell (2019, SECONDARY) adds Moore's daughter Mary's calligraphed copy of 1855. |
| T. W. C. Moore to George H. Moore (N-YHS Librarian), 15 Mar 1862 | Norsworthy 7 Feb 2018 [FULL transcription]; first printed *NYHS Quarterly Bulletin* 2.4 (Jan 1919): 111-15; Stevenson 1923 quotes it | "composed for his two daughters, as a Christmas present, about 40 years ago.--They were copied by a relative of Dr. Moores in her Album, from which a copy was made by a friend of hers, from Troy"; the "portly, rubicund, Dutchman" of Chelsea. Norsworthy showed (2018) that T. W. C. Moore (1794-1872) was the son of Judith Livingston Moore, Henry Livingston's first cousin and next-door neighbour. |
| Mary Odell's manuscript copy (New Brunswick Museum Archives, Odell papers; paper watermarked 1824) | Norsworthy 2016 [EXCERPT]; Jackson 2017 reply [FULL statement]; UNB Archives blog post by Leah Grandy, 21 Dec 2016 [SECONDARY, from earlier notes: reads "Donder and Blixen", with corrections "goes" to "rose", "tiny" to "lively"] | Odell was Moore's godfather; Mary Odell also copied other early Moore poems. Jackson: its variants ("Blixen", "pawing and prancing", "was slung over") show it "cannot have been based on anything sent to the family by Moore himself" (Jackson pp. 116-18). |
| Livingston-side witness letters: Eliza Livingston Thompson Lansing to Anne Livingston Goodrich, 4 Mar 1879; Benson J. Lossing to Cornelia Griswold Goodrich, 25 Nov and 6 Dec 1886; Simon W. Cooper to the *Sun*, 29 Dec 1899; Cornelia Goodrich to Henry Livingston of Babylon, 3 Jan 1900, and reply 10 Jan 1900; Mrs. Edward Livingston Montgomery (undated; printed by West 1920); Jeanne Hubbard Denig to W. S. Thomas, 13, 14 and 25 Mar 1917, 23 Dec 1918, 1920; Gertrude Thomas 1917, 1920; Mary Goodrich Montgomery 1917 | henrylivingston.com "Witnesses" and "Quest" pages [FULL transcriptions]; West 1920, MacCracken 1958, Stevenson 1923 quote several [FULL] | See section E for what each says about dates. |
| Maria Jephson O'Conor deposition, 20 Dec 1920 (MCNY 54.331.18-19) for the Moore family | Van Deusen timeline [EXCERPT]; Wikipedia citation | Says Moore told her he wrote it and made "only ... two slight changes" when publishing; Van Deusen counts 21 (elsewhere "55") differences between the 1823 and 1830 texts. |

### A2. The Livingston claim in print, 1919-1958

- **William S. Thomas, "Henry Livingston," *Year Book of the Dutchess County Historical Society* (1919), pp. 32-46.** [FULL, via henrylivingston.com transcription.] Biography of Livingston (Revolutionary major, surveyor, contributor to the *New York Magazine* and *Poughkeepsie Journal*, keeper of a manuscript verse book of 44 pieces, 1784-89) by his great-grandson. On the poem it says only that the family are "unanimous in their belief in a family tradition taught them from infancy", that "the loss of the manuscript by fire" and the first reading "years before" 1823 are "matters of common talk among his posterity", and that "a critical comparison of the 'Visit' with the acknowledged verses ... adds internal evidence" (noted specifically: the anapestic verse letters, the adverbial "all", the word "gave"). Ends: "in the hope that its publication may elicit new evidence."
- **Winthrop P. Tryon, *Christian Science Monitor*, 4 Aug 1920** (title given by Norsworthy as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas", by Wikipedia as "79 Mile to N. York"). [FULL, via henrylivingston.com.] First extended public argument, written from Thomas's papers. Reports the 1879 Lansing letter ("as sure ... as that Burns was the author of 'Tam O'Shanter'"), the 1900 Babylon letter about the corrected manuscript, Lossing's 1886 inquiry "without success", the manuscript book (one-third anapestic), the "R." signature, the 1829 pun and the 1838 *Troy Budget* naming of Moore; concedes "Moore's long possession put the burden of proof on the Livingston claimants" (quoting an unnamed professor) and that Livingston "regularly omitted" to seek credit for his writings.
- **Henry Litchfield West, "Who Wrote 'Twas the Night Before Christmas'?", *The Bookman* 52.4 (Dec 1920): 300-305.** [FULL.] Admits "the evidence is purely circumstantial. There is not extant a single written document which shows that Henry Livingston himself ever laid claim to authorship." Prints the Montgomery "governess" letter for the first time, the 1879 letter, the 1900 Babylon letter (reading c. 1804-05; manuscript burned at Waukesha c. 1847-48), notes the contradiction (Moore unmarried in 1804-05), Gertrude Thomas's reconciliation (the governess was connected with Livingston's family), Denig's 1808 dating, the 1865-70 Sing Sing schoolroom argument between Thomas's father and a Moore grandson, and Lossing's 1886 "gallows" letter; hopes "the question of authorship will be definitely settled."
- **Burton Egbert Stevenson, *Famous Single Poems and the Controversies Which Have Raged Around Them* (1923), chapter "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (pp. 47-80 in the 1924 Harrap edition read).** [FULL.] The first balanced treatment. Presents the Moore documentary chain (Holley 1823/1829, Hoffman 1837, *Poems* 1844, the 1862 N-YHS manuscript and T. W. C. Moore letter, Pelletreau's 1897 facsimile), then the Livingston case as supplied by Thomas (family belief "for more than a hundred years", the Lansing 1879, Babylon 1900 and Denig letters, the Montgomery governess story, the 1784-89 manuscript book, the Beekman verse letter, the "Mama"/'kerchief/Dutch-milieu argument). Verdict: on internal evidence alone the poem "might fairly be held to resemble the work of Henry Livingston much more closely", but "there is no single written document extant to show that Henry Livingston ever claimed the authorship", it is "strange" he never sent it to a paper between 1805 and 1823, "The Pig and the Rooster" proves Moore "could ... write very passable anapaests", and Moore's explicit 1844 claim at 63 makes theft "of the basest and meanest sort" incompatible with his "unblemished reputation". Proposes that Livingston "really did write a Christmas jingle ... in 1805 -- and so did Clement Clarke Moore seventeen years later", the two being confused in family memory.
- **Samuel White Patterson, *The Poet of Christmas Eve: A Life of Clement Clarke Moore, 1779-1863* (Morehouse-Gorham, 1956), pp. 17-19, 112-13, 118, Appendix C pp. 167-71.** [EXCERPT.] Moore's biographer: "The controversy ... should have been settled when this volume [Poems 1844] was published... The effort was commendable but futile ... Better proof will be needed." Appendix C summarises Thomas's thirty-year quest, the Jennie Hubbard statement ("Father ... read it at home before he sent it to be published in a Poughkeepsie paper. Father had the paper carefully preserved, but ... it is now lost"), West and Tryon, and notes "there is not a word from his own pen upon the authorship" and "No one, outside his family circle, appears to have heard of his having written the poem." Patterson also noted that Moore "contributed several of his pieces to *The New-York Book of Poetry* ... It was in this volume ... that he first acknowledged his authorship" (pp. 112-13, quoted by Norsworthy). Patterson is also the source (per Fox 2021, SECONDARY) of the later-debunked claim that Moore was an enslaver opposed to emancipation.
- **Henry Noble MacCracken, *Blithe Dutchess: The Flowering of an American County from 1812* (Hastings House, 1958), pp. 370-390.** [FULL.] The former Vassar president's advocacy for Livingston, written with the Thomas papers (then held by W. Stephen Thomas, Rochester). Ridicules Moore's *Poems* ("the protracted yawn"), lists the witnesses (Jane Paterson Thomas; Sidney M. Livingston "about ten years old" at the first reading; the 1879 Lansing letter, quoted in full; Goodrich 3 Jan 1900, including the claim of a Poughkeepsie printing "between 1780 and 1800"; Babylon 10 Jan 1900; Denig 23 Dec 1918 on Eliza Brewer at Christmas 1808), and constructs the transmission route "with some degree of probability": Locust Grove -> the children of Judith Livingston Moore (Livingston's first cousin and neighbour, married to John Moore) -> an album left at C. C. Moore's house -> a Miss Butler (Lydia or Harriet) who copied it to Troy in 1823 -> Holley's guess. Dates Lossing's inquiry to "seventy-five years ago". Jackson calls the route "pure speculation" (p. 119) while paraphrasing it; Norsworthy (2018) points out that one of Judith Livingston Moore's children, T. W. C. Moore, is precisely the witness who in 1862 attested Moore's authorship.
- **Niels H. Sonne, "'The Night Before Christmas': Who Wrote It?", *Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church* 41.4 (Dec 1972): 373-80 (JSTOR 42973358).** [SECONDARY: cited by Kaller (eulogists' "quiet, sparkling humor", p. 379), Norsworthy ("rock solid defense of Moore's authorship on the biographical evidence"), Jackson's bibliography (with the year misprinted 1971).]
- **Tristram Potter Coffin, *The Book of Christmas Folklore* (1973), pp. 87ff.** [SECONDARY; listed on henrylivingston.com's historical-articles page.]
- Also on the Livingston side's own chronology (henrylivingston.com "Historical Authorship Articles", FULL): Cooper 1899 and 1920 (*South Side Signal*), Thomas 1919, Tryon 1920, West 1920, Benchley and Starrett 1920 (dismissive; referred to by MacCracken as "the whim of a few old ladies"), Helen Wilkinson Reynolds 1942, a 1949 cartoon, Helen Myers 1963, Fleetwood and Dr. Thomas 1977, and MacCracken's 1970 Vassar involvement.

### A3. The modern debate, 1996-2016

- **Stephen Nissenbaum, *The Battle for Christmas* (Knopf, 1996).** [SECONDARY.] Historical reading of the poem as a knickerbocker invention (Pintard, Irving, the St. Nicholas Society) that domesticated Christmas; the NYSL exhibit (2015) notes it "omits mention of Livingston entirely"; p. 345 n. 85 cites the Lee diary (1834). Norsworthy calls its reading "the most thorough and satisfying academic reading" of the poem.
- **Don Foster, *Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous* (Henry Holt, 2000), ch. 6 "Yes, Virginia, There Was a Santa Claus", pp. 221-75.** [SECONDARY; reconstructed from Kirkpatrick's NYT report (FULL), Nissenbaum 2001 (FULL), Kaller (FULL, with page references), RPO's 2005 notes, Norsworthy and Jackson.] Page references reported by others: text of the 1823 poem pp. 222-24; "a free spirit and all-round merry old soul" (Livingston) p. 227; family testimony "settled on Christmas morning 1808" p. 237; composition "Christmas 1807 or 1808" p. 238; Moore's 1813 letter (misquoted, "pretended to suppose" elided) p. 247; "snug"/Ramsay/O'Keeffe pp. 259-60; "The coast was clear" p. 271; Merino sheep pp. 273-74; "The words on the handwritten or printed page are more indelible than fingerprints" p. 282. Arguments (all as reported): Moore a grouchy pedant obsessed with noise and "dread"; condemned "immodest verse" (1806 Juvenal preface) and tobacco ("opium's treacherous aid"); "did not know the original names of his own Dutch reindeer"; Merino inscription = prior plagiarism; Hoffman had the wrong poem (Moore's was "Old Santeclaus", 1821, with "dread", "various", passive "seen"); the 1844 Tuttle letter as clearance; the poem belongs to the bawdy anapestic tradition of William King and Christopher Anstey which Livingston imitated and Moore did not (Moore's only anapest, "The Pig and the Rooster", "modeled on the anapestic animal fables of Henry Livingston"); adverbial "all"; "all snug" from ribald anapests/O'Keeffe; "Happy Christmas" (Livingston's 30 Dec 1773 letter); flying images, Lapland reindeer, Thor; "extraneous exclamation points" in the roll call; Moore's "sticky-fingered Muse" borrowing phrases; Moore's poem appeared in the *Poughkeepsie Journal* on 16 Jan 1828 (Foster's find, per Norsworthy). Foster retracted his Shakespeare "Funeral Elegy" attribution in 2002 and settled an anthrax-letters libel suit in 2007 (Fox 2023); Fox calls the chapter "almost entirely fictional" and reports that Juola cites Foster's methods as "how not to do authorship attribution".
- **David D. Kirkpatrick, "Whose Jolly Old Elf Is That, Anyway? Literary Sleuth Casts Doubt on the Authorship of an Iconic Christmas Poem", *New York Times*, 26 Oct 2000.** [FULL, two web pages.] The contemporary summary of Foster's case (quoted above) with Foster's "would a man of God ... tell a lie? ... he did", Kaller's "like someone coming forward and saying that he wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner'", and Clement Clarke Moore II's "It is the poem itself that is important".
- **James Lowe, "A Christmas to Remember: A Visit from St. Nicholas", *Autograph Collector* (Jan 2000): 26-29.** [SECONDARY: cited by Kaller and Wikipedia for the finding that the Merino inscription is not in Moore's hand.]
- **Stephen Nissenbaum, "There Arose Such a Clatter: Who Really Wrote 'The Night before Christmas'? (And Why Does It Matter?)", *Common-place* 1.2 (Jan 2001).** [FULL.] Answers Foster point by point: Livingston "never took credit for the poem himself, and there is ... no actual historical evidence"; the Livingston claim "was first made in the late 1840s at the earliest (and possibly as late as the 1860s), by one of his daughters, who believed that her father had written the poem back in 1808"; textual analysis "doesn't prove anything", especially since Foster himself calls Moore a "literary sponge"; Foster's own markers ("noise", "dread") occur in the poem; "A Trip to Saratoga" is satire in a known genre and "shows Moore at his most child-centered"; Moore was a high-Federalist patrician, not a fundamentalist; "The Pig and the Rooster" was written from a son's school assignment (Foster's Livingston-modelling claim "curiously self-defeating"); the Merino notation is read differently; and the poem is a knickerbocker product (Pintard 1810, Irving 1809/1812/1821, the St. Nicholas Society) whose "Dutch" persona Livingston too may have adopted self-consciously. Conclusion: Moore "had the means, the opportunity, and even the motive".
- **Jill M. Farringdon, letter to Mary Van Deusen, 17 Jan 2001.** [FULL, on henrylivingston.com.] Applied "cusum analysis" to the texts printed in the NYT and Foster: the poem "was clearly distinguishable from the utterance of Moore" and "INDISTINGUISHABLE from the utterance of Major Livingston". (Cusum/QSUM as a technique has been widely rejected in forensic linguistics; that is general knowledge, not something verified from a source read for this study.)
- **Mary S. Van Deusen, *Dunder and Blixem! It's Henry Livingston* (2001)** [SECONDARY; NYSL call no. 808.0072 qV243] and her website **henrylivingston.com** [FULL for the pages saved: timeline, witnesses, quest, scholars, arguments, data, historical articles]. The site is the source for the Livingston canon used by Jackson, for the transcriptions of Moore's manuscript poems (MCNY), and for the witness letters. Its timeline claims: reading 1807-09; a governess carried the poem to a Moore family "down south" via Chelsea before 1822; Moore read it "as his own" at Christmas 1822 and told his children "not to let it out of the house"; Eliza Brewer Livingston was shown Moore's attribution in 1859; Sidney's family learned of it in 1862; the manuscript burned in Wisconsin in 1859 (the Babylon letter says 1847-48); the family stayed silent because Moore was "high in the seminary of the Episcopalian Church".
- **Nancy H. Marshall, *The Night Before Christmas: A Descriptive Bibliography of Clement Clarke Moore's Immortal Poem* (Oak Knoll, 2002).** [SECONDARY; used by Kaller's Appendix D and by Jackson (item 20 = Keese's *Poets of America*, 1840).]
- **Joe Nickell, "The Case of the Christmas Poem", *Manuscripts* 54.4 (Fall 2002): 293-308, and "Part 2", *Manuscripts* 55.1 (Winter 2003): 5-15.** [SECONDARY; known through Kaller (quotation from 55.1 p. 10: "It is easy to fall into the trap of starting with the desired answer and working backward to the evidence"), Kaller's Appendix E (Nickell's unpublished "Comparison of Phraseology", FULL), Norsworthy (Nickell's ballad-vs-verse-epistle argument at Part 2 pp. 9-10; the simile point, 2003), Jackson (who "argues with Joe Nickell" throughout), Kingery's 2013 NIU dissertation, and Nickell's CFI blog post of 19 Dec 2019 (SECONDARY, from earlier notes: four manuscripts plus Mary Moore's 1855 copy; "From Saint Nicholas"; Holley 1829; Tuttle/Sackett; Occam's razor; Jackson's phonemes ignore cadence and rhyme; Jackson concedes the documentary evidence favours Moore).] Appendix E pairs phrases of the *Visit* with Moore's other verse: adverbial "all" (six Moore examples), "snug and tidy", "visions", "kerchief, cap", "brain(s)" (five examples), "clatter/spatter", "flash", "objects shone", "silent snow", "with wonder"/"wond'ring", "coursers", "dash", "prancing steeds", "twinkle of the eye", "rosy cheeks, the dimpled smile", "droll", "wink", "secret dread", "ere long", plus the *Children's Friend* reindeer and Irving's "laying his finger beside his nose".
- **Seth Kaller, "The Authorship of The Night Before Christmas" (sethkaller.com, chapters I-V and appendices A-E; adapted from "The Moore Things Change...", *New-York Journal of American History*, 2004 -- NYSL catalogues the issue as fall 2004).** [FULL.] Four "fallacies" of Foster: (1) Moore a plagiarist -- the Merino inscription is not Moore's hand (App. A; Lowe; Nickell); (2) a Grinch -- Moore's 1813 letter is misquoted, Strong's diary misread (William, not Clement, Moore), an 1849 verse says "I long to hear you romp and riot", Sonne's eulogists; (3) a Scrooge -- the tobacco point rests on "The Wine Drinker", which satirises temperance hypocrites; (4) stylistic evidence -- mixed iambs/anapests, exclamation marks, adverbial "all", "all snug" all occur in Moore; OED gives Steele 1714 and Anstey 1766 for "snug", three pre-1789 "all snug"s; Scott's *Guy Mannering* (1815: "snug ... donner and blitzen") and Irving's "snug elbow chair"; Irving's 1821 addition "laying his finger beside his nose" dates the poem to 1822, "not earlier"; "Donder" and "Blitzen" are "authentic German"; Moore corrected "Blixem" to "Blitzen" on the Tuttle broadside. On the Livingston claim: based on Eliza Brewer Livingston's "recovered memory" "In 1848, 1861, or even later (no one in the family knows)", most likely prompted by the 1863 *Harper's Weekly* Nast printing; "The written Livingston family claims begin around 1870"; earlier family datings (1780-1800, 1805, 1807) contradict the 1808 story; Catherine Livingston Breese died 21 Aug 1808; Moore was a bachelor until 1813 and needed no governess until 1815; Livingston published New Year's addresses yet never claimed the poem through its many reprints 1823-28; "over 40 years of searches" found no printing with Livingston's name. Appendix C chronology and Appendix D early-publication timeline (1823-1863). Kaller's pages do not discuss Jackson; his reaction to Jackson is in CBC 2017 (below).
- **Ted Mann, "Ho, Ho, Hoax", *Scarsdale Magazine*, 30 Nov 2006.** [SECONDARY; Wikipedia citation for Foster's challenge.]
- **Emily A. Kingery, doctoral dissertation (Northern Illinois University, 2013)** citing Nickell. [SECONDARY; Norsworthy post of 31 Mar 2017.]
- **Mock trials, Troy NY**: "The Trial Before Christmas" (Duncan Crary and Jack Casey), 2013 (hung jury) and 2014 (verdict for Livingston); on hiatus 2015 for a stage play (NYSL 2015; CBC 2017). Per earlier notes the Troy mayor proclaimed a "Henry Livingston Jr. Day" (23 Dec) [SECONDARY]. A Hallmark film based on the trials aired in 2022 (Fox 2023).
- **MacDonald P. Jackson, statement of 17 Dec 2013 (henrylivingston.com "Scholars").** [FULL.] Explains his entry into the question after reading Foster ("Moore's champions ... seemed to me not to have satisfactorily answered Don's most telling points"), his impression of Livingston's "warmth, empathy, bonhomie, eye for detail" versus Moore the "satirist and moralizer", and announces: "Every test, so far applied, associates 'The Night Before Christmas' much more closely with Livingston's verse than with Moore's... It will surprise me if all reliable kinds of testing do not reach the same conclusions." Data were supplied from December 2011 by Van Deusen, Paul Kosinski (programs) and Lyn Bates (who suggested the CMU pronouncing dictionary for phonemes).
- **New York State Library, "Revisiting 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'", exhibit, Dec 2015 (Carol Reid).** [FULL.] Neutral survey; notes that Britannica/Columbia encyclopedias then stated "In 2000 it was determined that the poem was probably the work of Henry Livingston, Jr." and that a German/Pennsylvania-Dutch edition credited Livingston.
- **MacDonald P. Jackson, *Who Wrote "The Night Before Christmas"? Analyzing the Clement Clarke Moore vs. Henry Livingston Question* (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), viii + 194 pp., ISBN 978-1-4766-6443-9.** [SECONDARY/EXCERPT: table of contents (archive.org metadata), the author's data page on henrylivingston.com (FULL), Jackson's two 2017 replies (FULL), and the page-cited quotations in Norsworthy's reviews.] Chapters: Introduction; 1 External and internal evidence; 2 (Livingston's verse); 3 Reindeer names, exclamations and other clues; 4 The question of sources; 5 Evidence of meter; 6 Statistical interlude; 7 Attributive adjectives; 8 Rhyme links; 9 Shared three-word sequences and parallels; 10 Phoneme pairs; 11 Categories of phoneme pairs; 12 Individual phoneme pairs; 13 Definite and indefinite articles; 14 Very high-frequency words; 15 Favorite expressions and quirks of style; 16 Common words that discriminate; 17 Words of medium-high frequency; 18 Checking the tests: Moore's manuscript poems; 19 The Moore creation myth; 20 The Livingston version; 21 Further considerations (Odell); 22 "Old Santeclaus" and Moore; 23 Summary and conclusions; App. I Livingston selected poems; App. II lists of poems (pp. 164-72); App. III printer's copy for the *Visit* in *Poems* 1844 (pp. 173-4). Full description of data, methods and results in section C.

### A4. Responses to Jackson and later work, 2016-2026

- **Scott Norsworthy (Melvilliana blog), "Computer error, please try again", 7 Nov 2016** [FULL]; **"Settle your brains, Clement C. Moore wrote 'The Night Before Christmas'", 15 Nov 2016** [SECONDARY: its "brain(s)" tallies are repeated in the 2017 posts]; **"Clement C. Moore's published letter", 24 Jan 2017** [FULL]; **"Recommended fixes for MacDonald P. Jackson's flawed methodology", 9 Feb 2017** [FULL]; **"Trigrams that count", 6 Mar 2017** [FULL]; **"Dunder-Donder, Blixem-Blixen...", 24 Mar 2017** [FULL]; **"Eight great favorite expressions of Clement C. Moore", 28 Apr 2017** [FULL]; **"How we know that Clement C. Moore wrote 'The Night Before Christmas' (and Henry Livingston, Jr. did not)", 16 May 2017** [FULL]; **"Key witness letter by Livingston cousin ... TWC Moore", 7 Feb 2018** [FULL]; **"Pre-1844 attributions", 8 Aug 2018** [FULL]; **"First printing", 8 Apr 2019** [FULL]; **review of Jerman, 13 Dec 2023** [FULL]; Substack, "Attributions of A Visit from St. Nicholas [to Joseph Wood and Rev. John W. Curtis]", Jan 2026 [SECONDARY]; "Santa Claus in Morristown, NJ", Feb 2025 [SECONDARY]. Norsworthy is an independent Melville scholar and is the most important post-2016 contributor on the documentary side; his critique of Jackson is summarised in section C.3 and his positive case in table B (rows M3-M8, M10, M13).
- **MacDonald P. Jackson, "Response to Scott Norsworthy" (posted 3 Feb 2017)** and **"Jackson on Norsworthy" (dated 13 Mar, posted 16 Mar 2017)**, both on Melvilliana. [FULL.] Jackson's fullest public restatement of his method and results, with concessions (Table 14.1 misprint; trigrams "ineffectual"; "Happy Christmas" not rare; "Biography of the Heart" should be added; the 1844 letter "has strengthened the external evidence for Moore"; "In the face of this unequivocal statement, arguers for Livingston's authorship must accuse Moore of an outright untruth, which is not an attractive prospect") and his final position: "I still cannot reconcile the external evidence for Moore's authorship ... with the internal evidence for Livingston's. The Livingstonian position must be ... 'more research is needed.'"
- **MacDonald P. Jackson, "Style and Authorship in a Classic of Popular Culture: Henry Livingston and 'The Night Before Christmas'", *Style* 51.4 (2017): 482-505.** [ABSTRACT only; full text paywalled.] Uses the two "most effective discriminators" (common-word rates and phoneme pairs) "to discriminate between Livingston's verse and a corpus of verse akin to his by a wide range of contributors to the journals in which he published. Again, 'The Night Before Christmas' turns out to be associated with Livingston, rather than with his contemporaries." Jackson's March 2017 reply says this follow-up combined capitalised and uncapitalised word forms and that the 1803 and 1819 Carrier's Addresses "both belong with Livingston rather than with a miscellaneous group of his contemporaries"; Norsworthy (2018) notes the article credits Melvilliana for the 1844 letter (p. 491). No review or rebuttal of the article was found.
- **Mark Gollom, "'The matter can never be settled'", CBC News, 24 Dec 2017.** [FULL.] Jackson by email: "The best evidence favouring Livingston is hard to explain away"; "It's quite likely that the matter can never be settled." Kaller: "Obama birth certificate territory"; "There is literally no contemporary evidence that Livingston ever claimed to be or was the author"; Jackson's "data is constrained by the limited written texts available" and he chose Livingston poems that lead to his conclusion -- "I can cherry pick a few [Moore poems], after which you would say, of course Moore wrote A Visit."
- **UNB Libraries/Archives blog (Leah Grandy), 21 Dec 2016** on the Odell copy. [SECONDARY, from earlier notes.]
- **Joe Nickell, Center for Inquiry blog, 19 Dec 2019.** [SECONDARY, earlier notes.] Restates his Moore case against Jackson (phoneme counts ignore cadence and rhyme; Jackson concedes the documentary evidence).
- **Justin Fox, "A Gift for America's Christmas Poet: Rehabilitation", Bloomberg Opinion, 22 Dec 2021.** [SECONDARY; cited by Norsworthy 2023 and Fox 2023.] Debunks the enslaver/anti-emancipation charge traced to Patterson 1956; concludes Foster "is not a reliable source".
- **Pamela McColl, *'Twas the Night: The Art and History of the Classic Christmas Poem* (Grafton and Scratch, 2022).** [SECONDARY: press coverage (Watertown Daily Times, 12 Sep 2022) and Norsworthy 2023 (ColumbiaDC bicentennial event "of the Poem by Clement Clarke Moore", Dec 2023).] Pro-Moore popular history; Moore was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame on 19 Dec 2023.
- **Tom A. Jerman, *The Fight for "The Night": Resolving the Authorship Dispute over "The Night Before Christmas"* (McFarland, 2023).** [SECONDARY: Norsworthy's review (FULL) and Fox 2023 (FULL).] A retired litigator's synthesis. Reported contents: Moore's 1844 letter (pp. 27-28); a "prudent course" explanation of Moore's delay (waiting for Gilley's *Children's Friend* copyright to expire in 1835, pp. 29-32); the 1824 *Sentinel* snow poem (pp. 19-20); T. W. C. Moore as Livingston kin (pp. 216-19); "The Unreliability of the Livingston Witness Letters" and "Witness Letters Are Second-, Third-, and Fourth-hand Hearsay" (pp. 227-36); Irving 1812+ and *Old Santeclaus* 1821 as "inescapable" sources incompatible with an 1807-09 date (pp. 209-12, 224-27, 329); Livingston's Dutch Reformed household "had no presents, no ribbons..." (ch. 11, pp. 273-80; back cover: "Livingston's religion, Dutch Reformed, prohibited celebration of Christmas or veneration of saints"); chapters 7-8 on attribution best practices (Schoenbaum, Love, Ainsworth, Chaski, Juola; "prevalidate" methods, p. 173); chapter 9 "Foster's and Jackson's Violations of the Best Practices" (failure to test for accuracy, pp. 175-76; inaccurate corpora, 176-81; no independent researchers, 181-85; no author profile, 185-87; "hired gun", 187-92; unacknowledged bias, 192-96); Norsworthy's deal-breakers inventoried (pp. 314-16) and his eight expressions judged "more useful than Jackson's ... six" (pp. 316, 351); "The Pig and the Rooster" transcribed and compared to Dr. Seuss (pp. 257-65); chapter 13, "The Use of JGAAP in the Moore-Livingston Dispute": an earlier unreported JGAAP trial and Jerman's own 17 tests "with some friendly advice from Juola" using "the same bodies of texts" -- 16 of 17 pointed to Moore (Fox); Norsworthy notes "Relative numbers and percentages within each test are not provided".
- **Justin Fox, "Case Almost Closed on Who Wrote 'The Night Before Christmas'", Bloomberg Opinion, 19 Dec 2023.** [FULL.] Commissioned Shlomo Argamon (Illinois Institute of Technology) to test the 1823 text against Livingston's known poems (Van Deusen's transcriptions), Moore's (*Poems* 1844, the MCNY manuscript book as transcribed by Van Deusen, and one N-YHS poem transcribed by Fox), and distractor corpora by Fitz-Greene Halleck, Joseph Rodman Drake, Samuel Woodworth, Jonathan Odell and (attributed) William B. Gilley. Method: word-frequency features; "say we have a thousand different features, and randomly pick 500 of them and measure similarity only on those 500 ... a hundred different times". Result: "Moore is much more likely to be the author than Livingston", "more likely authored by either Moore or Livingston than any of the other guys"; "Would I bet $1,000? No. Would I bet $100? Yes." Reality check: words in the poem used often by one poet and never by the other -- Livingston: "jolly", "chin", "broad" (context-dependent); Moore: "ere", "dread", "opening". Fox adds the Dutch New Year's/"Santa Claus" point (Henry A. Livingston, 1841: "in infancy we never hear of [St. Nicholas]") and concludes: "unless somebody finds some pretty compelling documentary evidence pointing to Livingston, it does seem as if it ought to end the authorship controversy."
- **New York State Library libguide, 19 Dec 2025** [SECONDARY, earlier notes]; **The New York Historical, "'On Donner, On Blitzen!' Revisiting Clement Clarke Moore's Christmas Manuscript" (Anne Garner), 22 Dec 2025** [FULL; institutional, pro-Moore; contains two slips -- "1863" for the 1823 first printing and "Blixen" for the Sentinel's "Blixem"]; **Library of Congress blog, 22 Dec 2025** [NOT RETRIEVED -- the archived copy was unreadable].
- **A pro-Livingston piece dated 6 Dec 2024 (author recorded in my earlier notes as "Penry")** [NOT RE-VERIFIED; venue not recovered]. Otherwise no post-2017 scholarly defence of Jackson's results, no reply to Argamon/Jerman, and (per Norsworthy 2023) no new authorship content on henrylivingston.com "for a good while" were found.

---

## B. Table of specific stylistic, lexical and documentary claims

Abbreviations: F = Foster 2000 (as reported); Nb = Nissenbaum 2001; K = Kaller 2004; Nk = Nickell 2002-03/App. E; J = Jackson 2016 (page refs as cited by Norsworthy or Jackson himself), J17 = Jackson's 2017 replies; N = Norsworthy (date); Jm = Jerman 2023 (as reviewed); A = Argamon/Fox 2023; St = Stevenson 1923; T = Thomas 1919; VD = Van Deusen site. "Status" is my assessment of where the literature leaves the point as of 2026.

### B1. Arguments advanced for Livingston (or against Moore)

| # | Claim | Who (where) | Evidence offered | Rebuttal / counter-evidence (who, how) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| L1 | Moore's temperament ("the Professor", grouch, prude, obsessed with children's noise; "clamorish girls", "boisterous boys") made him incapable of the poem | F (NYT 2000; K pp. 209-17; Nb) | Moore's *Poems* 1844 (Saratoga, To My Young Countrywomen, Invitation to a Ball, The Organist), 1806 Juvenal preface on "immodest verse", 1813 letter | Nb: Saratoga is genre satire and Moore's most child-centred poem; noise and "dread" are motifs of the *Visit* itself; Moore a Federalist patrician, not a "Bible thumper". K: 1813 letter misquoted (Foster 247), Strong diary misread, 1849 verse "I long to hear you romp and riot", eulogists' "quiet, sparkling humor" (Sonne). N: "To Southey" on the deaths of wife and daughters. J17 conceded his "loved his wife and children" was "unduly flippant" but maintains tonal contrast. | Character case widely regarded as rebutted; only the impressionistic "misfit" judgment survives (see L26). |
| L2 | Moore hated tobacco ("opium's treacherous aid") so would not give St. Nick a pipe | F (NYT) | "The Wine Drinker" | K: that poem mocks temperance hypocrites; Irving's St. Nicholas smokes; pipe as social marker. | Rebutted. |
| L3 | "Dunder and Blixem" (1823) are the right Dutch names; Moore's "Donder and Blitzen" (1844) shows he "did not know the original names of his own Dutch reindeer"; the exclamation placement and Vixen/Blixem nasal half-rhyme are Livingstonian | F (NYT: "to a Dutchman like Livingston it was exactly right"); J ch. 3 (pp. 15-16: Sentinel "preserved the original authorial spellings"; "Blixen" a "bastard form", p. 117); J17 restates | Livingston's Dutchess County/Dutch grandparents; Moore knew German | K: Moore altered Blixem->Blitzen in his own hand on the 1830 broadside (MCNY 54.331.17); *Guy Mannering* 1815. N 24 Mar 2017: 1743-1841 examples show blixen/blitzen/blixum/blixem used interchangeably ("Dunder and Blixen" for Santa's reindeer, Reading PA, 31 Dec 1825; "A Yankee Pass" printed with both blixen and blitzen rhyming "vixen", 1826/1828); Moore himself supplied Hoffman's 1837 "Donder and Blixen"; Livingston never wrote dunder/blixem; Denig recalled Livingston's oath as "Dunder & Blitzen" (1917) / "Donder & Blitzen" (1918); two copyists and a compositor intervened before 1823. Nb: pseudo-Dutch identity was a knickerbocker project Moore belonged to. | Contested. The "authorial spelling" premise is the weak link; Jackson stands by the point. |
| L4 | Moore was already a plagiarist (Merino sheep treatise inscription "by Clement C. Moore") | F pp. 273-74 (NYT: "no George Washington") | Title-page notation vs. copyright to Francis Durand | K App. A with Lowe (2000) and Nk: the notation is not in Moore's hand; Nb: notation misread. | Rebutted; Foster's strongest concrete charge collapsed. |
| L5 | Hoffman (1837) "had the wrong poem": Moore's real Christmas poem was "Old Santeclaus" (*Children's Friend*, 1821) | F (NYT p. 2; RPO note; J ch. 22 discusses) | "dread", "various", passive "seen"; four stanzas scolding naughty children | Nb: no evidence Moore wrote it; "dread" is then evidence for Moore. N: "make their home" a commonplace. Jm and Nk treat *Old Santeclaus* as a *source* of the *Visit* (reindeer, sleigh); A used Gilley-attributed verse as a distractor author and it did not attract the poem. | Unsupported; no one since Foster has defended it. |
| L6 | The Tuttle correspondence (Feb 1844) shows Moore checking that "the coast was clear" before claiming the poem | F p. 271 (quoted J17); VD timeline | Tuttle's 26 Feb 1844 reply | N 2017-18: Moore had claimed the poem in 1837 by supplying it with three others to Hoffman ("I gave the publisher several pieces"), and was named in print c. 25 times 1836-43; his 27 Feb 1844 letter predates receipt of Tuttle's reply (dated 26 Feb, "just received" Moore's of 23 Feb) and gives an uncertain composition date, as a man without Tuttle's letter would; Holley knew by 1824 (1836 statement). J17: "an intriguing proximity of dates", but Moore's statement is "unequivocal". | Largely rebutted; Jackson notes the chronology without pressing it. |
| L7 | The poem belongs to the bawdy anapestic tradition (William King, Anstey) that Livingston imitated; Moore's sole anapest, "The Pig and the Rooster", borrows nothing from it and was "modeled on the anapestic animal fables of Henry Livingston" | F (NYT); Tryon 1920 ("laborious effort at fun") | Livingston's manuscript book (one-third anapestic), Christmas/New Year verse letters | St: "Pig and Rooster" proves Moore "could ... write very passable anapaests". K/Nk: "From Saint Nicholas" (MCNY, c. 1821), "Irish Valentine", "For a Kiss" are also anapestic. Nb: the Livingston-modelling claim is "self-defeating". N 2017: Anstey "influenced everybody -- including Clement C. Moore" (Pig and Rooster rhymes); twelve *Visit* rhymes occur in one Bridges burlesque. J uses four Moore anapests as controls. | Moore's anapestic competence established; the tradition is common property. |
| L8 | Adverbial/intensifying "all" ("all through", "all snug", "dressed all in fur") is a Livingston habit | F (NYT); T 1919 ("adverbial use of the word all and the odd usage of gave") | Frequency in Livingston's verse | Nk App. E: Moore's "all ripe", "all alone", "all so bloody and red", "in ice all clad", "all white", "all sweet and fair"; K: "can also be seen in many lines written by Moore". | Weak; unquantified by either side. |
| L9 | "All snug" first appears in ribald anapests / O'Keeffe (1789), and "snug" links to Ramsay's Scots (Foster 259-60) | F | LION/OED searches | K: OED's earliest is Steele 1714 (Foster cited Ramsay), Anstey 1766 in OED; three "all snug" before 1789; *Guy Mannering* 1815 ("remain snug ... donner and blitzen!"); Irving 1809/1821 "snug elbow chair"; Moore's "snug, and tidy wife" (Saratoga). | Rebutted. |
| L10 | "Happy Christmas" (not "Merry") is a Livingston marker (letter to Sally Welles, 30 Dec 1773); "then extremely rare" (J pp. 47-8) | F; J | LION frequencies | N: common among Protestants of the period; J17 (Mar 2017): "Norsworthy certainly shows that wishing somebody a 'Happy Christmas' ... was much less rare ... than in Literature Online", though some examples are not direct wishes. Jm: Livingston's 1773 wish is the only Christmas reference in his papers. | Conceded weak by Jackson. |
| L11 | Livingston's imagery (flying children/animals/vehicles, Lapland reindeer, Thor's chariot, "intense awareness of flying creatures", "fascination with the miniature") matches the poem | F (NYT); J p. 128; J13 | Livingston's rebuses, Eskimo/Lapland pieces, "God Is Love" | N May 2017: Livingston's verse has no fantasy invading a real setting; his Oberon is a rebus clue; Moore's "Apology" (an elf "far below the human size"), "Nymphs of Mount Harmony", *Charles Elphinstone*; "magic" 10x and "fairy" 7x in Moore. Nk/Jm: reindeer with St. Nicholas first in print 1821. | Impressionistic on both sides. |
| L12 | "Extraneous exclamation points" in the reindeer roll call ("Now! Dasher, now! Dancer") are a Livingston habit | F (NYT); J17 ("anomalous position characteristic of Livingston's way with such punctuation, but not Moore's") | Livingston's punctuation | K: exclamation marks also in Moore; N: 1823 punctuation passed through an album copy, a second copy and Holley's compositor; Moore's 1844 text moves them. | Contested; hinges on the authority of 1823 accidentals. |
| L13 | Livingston's milieu fits the poem: Dutch village customs, "Mama", Mrs Livingston's night 'kerchief, Locust Grove's lawn and fireplaces | T 1919 (as summarised by St); MacCracken; VD | Family memory | St: Chelsea had a lawn and fireplaces, Mrs Moore "just as likely" to be "Mama" in a 'kerchief. Nb: Livingston's "Dutch" persona possibly self-conscious. Fox/Jm: Dutch New Yorkers gave gifts at New Year's and said "Santa Claus" not "St. Nicholas" (Henry A. Livingston, 1841); Livingston's Dutch Reformed household shows no Christmas observance. | Neutral to negative for Livingston. |
| L14 | Family testimony: Livingston read the poem at breakfast/Christmas c. 1804-05 (Babylon 1900), 1808 (Denig; Foster p. 237), "1805 to 1810" (VD); a corrected manuscript existed and burned; the family was "astonished" to see Moore's name | Lansing 1879; Goodrich/Babylon 1900; Montgomery (West 1920); Denig 1917-20; T, Tryon, West, MacCracken, F, J ch. 20 (pp. 110-12) | Letters 1879-1920 (all from children born after 1794 or grandchildren) | St: "no single written document"; unpublished 1805-23 though read to admirers; the two-poem confusion hypothesis. K: Catherine Breese (the Montgomery letter's source) died 21 Aug 1808; Moore unmarried until 1813, no governess before 1815; earlier family datings 1780-1800/1805/1807. Patterson: "not a word from his own pen". N: no child of Livingston ever made a public claim; Carrier's-Address confusion hypothesis; the Livingston cousin T. W. C. Moore attested Moore in 1862. Jm: 2nd-4th-hand hearsay. J17: "The Livingston notion ... is not inherently incredible"; a Carrier's Address could not be confused with a poem about an elf and reindeer. | The core external evidence for Livingston: late, hearsay, internally inconsistent on dates, but persistent across five family lines. |
| L15 | Transmission route: Locust Grove -> Judith Livingston Moore's children -> album at C. C. Moore's house -> Miss Butler -> Troy (MacCracken pp. 388-90); or a governess going "down south" via Chelsea (VD) | MacCracken 1958; VD; J p. 119 | Genealogy (Judith Livingston, John Moore, the Harts, the Butlers) | J: "pure speculation". N 2018: the same family produced T. W. C. Moore, whose 1862 letter describes Moore composing the poem for his daughters and its copying "by a relative of Dr. Moores in her Album" and by "a friend of hers, from Troy"; Tuttle 1844 names Sarah Sackett as the immediate source. | Speculative; the one documented member of the "route" family testified for Moore. |
| L16 | Moore prepared his 1844 text from Tuttle's 1830 broadside, which differs from 1823 in 55 (or 21) editorial readings; he "didn't know the difference ... because he didn't write it"; "No pre-publication autograph by Moore has ever surfaced" | VD timeline; J pp. 173-4 and J17 | The MCNY broadside; the O'Conor 1920 "two slight changes" deposition | N Mar 2017: Moore had already given a manuscript to Hoffman (1837), so a printed copy-text was a convenience; his autograph corrections on it are evidence of authorial revision; the deposition is late hearsay. | Open but minor; both sides agree no pre-1823 autograph by either man exists. |
| L17 | Edwin Livingston's verse letter of 11 June 1821 contains "visions of", "lustre", "hoof" and "to work" within ~60 lines -- unique in LION except for the *Visit* -- so Edwin "subconsciously echoed" a poem that existed before Dec 1822 | J17 (and VD "visions of gaiety") | LION search | N 2016: "Commonplaces ... no sugar-plums", "pretty weak". | Contested; a single striking co-occurrence. |
| L18 | Livingston's rebuses ("goddess refulgent whose far-beaming rays / Can pour upon error meridian blase", etc.) parallel "The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow / Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below"; "new fall'n snows" and "snow-white breast" are Livingston's; "nothing comparable in Moore" | J ch. 9; J17 | Three/four rebus couplets; LION: no "breast of the snow" anywhere 1750-1850 | N Nov 2016: the rebuses contain no moon, snow or objects ("Bleah!"); Moore has "lustre" twice (incl. "lustre of the day", *Biography of the Heart*), "objects" 6x, "the moon's soft silvery ray / Spread like a mantle o'er the objects round" (*Charles Elphinstone*), a whole poem on new-fallen snow (*Troy Sentinel*, 20 Feb 1824), "mountain's breast" near "snowy shower". J17: "wondering eyes" occurs 113 times in LION; parallel-collecting "is apt to produce conflicting evidence". | Parallels cancel; Jackson himself downgraded this class of evidence. |
| L19 | Rhymes belly/jelly and elf/self within five lines, "right jolly"/"right [adj.]", nasal half-rhymes are Livingstonian, absent from Moore; rhyme-link test (ch. 8) | J pp. 47-8, ch. 8; J17; family lore ("clatter/matter") | Livingston's verse letters | N May 2017: Anstey's *New Bath Guide* ("I heard such a clatter ... what the deuce was the matter"), "Anthony Pasquin" (elf/himself, jelly/belly), Bridges; Moore's "Irish Valentine" has snow/below (J: counted in ch. 18, p. 99). | Weak for either side. |
| L20 | Trigrams shared exclusively with one candidate favour Livingston ("new fallen snow", "meet with an", later "his eye and") | J ch. 9 (p. 45: "Concentrating on trigrams avoids subjectivity") | Exhaustive search of both corpora | N 6 Mar 2017: 13 trigrams Jackson missed (incl. "as the snow", "turn'd, with a", "I, in my", "the top of" 2x, "not a word", "to the skies", "in a moment", "the breast of" 2x, "of his eye", "and then, in"). J17 (Mar): recount = Livingston 3 exclusive vs Moore 9, exactly the 3:1 corpus-size ratio; "trigrams end up telling us 'nothing, neither way'". | Withdrawn as evidence by Jackson. |
| L21 | Moore's six "favorite expressions" (some 75-3, oft 30-1, many a 17-0, in vain 16-2, at length 12-3, that's 10-0; 160 vs 9 overall) are absent from the *Visit* | J ch. 15 (pp. 73ff) | Counts in *Poems* 1844 vs Livingston | N 28 Apr 2017: selection criteria unstated and "rigged" (expressions that happen not to occur in the poem); eight alternative Moore markers (should, would, like, hope, ere, dread, vision/s, brain/s: 499 vs 42 overall) occur 15 times in the *Visit* vs an expected ~7 for Moore and <2 for Livingston; Jackson's list yields zero hits on five short Moore poems that Norsworthy's identifies. J17: would/should/like are already counted in chs. 16-17. Jm: Norsworthy's eight "more useful". | Numerically the strongest single lexical argument in the exchange, and it favours Moore. |
| L22 | Phoneme pairs: ratio of Livingston-favoured to (Livingston+Moore)-favoured pairs -- Livingston mean 66.654, Moore 42.912, *Visit* 64.912; Fig. 3 places the poem mid-Livingston, outside Moore's range | J chs. 10-12; data page; J17 | CMU pronouncing dictionary; chi-square over top-100 pairs; 1483 Livingston lines vs 2750 Moore lines after dropping poems with <12 favoured pairs (25 Livingston, 6 Moore poems dropped) | N: AH-initial pairs are driven by "the"/"a", which anapestic meter "pumps up" (J concedes AH pairs track articles). J17: anapestic vs non-anapestic Livingston pieces differ non-significantly (p > 0.2); overlaps between poets are "between different poems on different tests". Nk 2019: phonemes ignore cadence and rhyme. Jm: no validity testing, inaccurate corpora. | Unreplicated by any independent party; the meter confound is only partly answered (see C.3). |
| L23 | High-frequency words: Spearman rank correlation of 26 shared words, *Visit*-Livingston .7638 vs *Visit*-Moore .6633; "Livingston-favored" set (I his my her on as is was at thy will day When me Where While) vs "Moore-favored" (to from your for they be With this our not which so would For it heart Of are we) separates the corpora by t-test and puts the poem "within Livingston's range" but "at the extreme end of Moore's" | J ch. 14, 16; data page | Top-50 word lists; 1.2x rate criterion | N: "meaningless bits"; "to" nearer Moore's mean; forms of "be" excluded; capital/lower-case counted separately. J17: "to" excluded only from stand-alone testing because a t-test found no significant difference, and is counted as Moore-favoured in ch. 16; anapestic Livingston pieces actually score *lower* (53.4708) than his others (64.8487), so meter cannot explain the result; *Poems* 1844 text would change one "that" and one "was" only. | Jackson's central evidence; the meter objection is answered for this test, the corpus-composition objection (C.3) is not fully. |
| L24 | Medium-high-frequency words (next 60): 34 Livingston- vs 37 Moore-favoured; for poems with >=10 test words Livingston mean 60.814, Moore 29.489, *Visit* 53.704 (Moore range 14.583-53.333; Livingston 30.000-89.474) | J ch. 17; data page | As above | N: same objections; "like" (8 in the poem) buried in the table. J17: anapestic vs other Livingston pieces 61.7204 vs 63.2948 (n.s.). | As L23. |
| L25 | Articles ("the"+"a") 11.439% of the poem's words vs Moore's anapests 3.271-9.322%; attributive adjectives 16.236% vs 27.8-39.4% in Moore's four anapests; "And"-initial lines never followed by a comma (Livingston 0/212; Moore 40/307; poem 0/12) | J chs. 7, 13; data page; J17 | Counts | N: all three are functions of anapestic meter; J concedes for adjectives (pp. 97-98: "Moore could conceivably have written a poem in anapests that was as sparing of adjectives") and that these tests are "of some efficacy but of less than more comprehensive counts". J17: some non-anapestic Livingston poems exceed 11.4% articles; Moore's highest article rates are in non-anapestic late poems. | Conceded as secondary by Jackson. |
| L26 | Impressionistic: "no reader of poetry with any sense of literary style ... 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" (J p. 11; conclusion p. 128); Moore "a moralist, a pedagogue and satirist" (CBC) | J; J13; MacCracken 1958; Tryon 1920; St (partly) | Reading of *Poems* 1844 | N: begs the question ("Moore sucks"); W. A. Jones's 1847 review; Moore's fantasy and epic similes. K: "Those same traits could be said about Livingston." | Subjective; acknowledged as such by Jackson ("perfectly normal and legitimate to have a theory and then objectively test it"). |
| L27 | Jackson's 2017 *Style* test: against a corpus of Livingston's periodical contemporaries, the poem still groups with Livingston | J *Style* 51.4 | Common words + phoneme pairs, capitalisation merged | None found (paywalled; not discussed by Norsworthy, Jerman-as-reviewed, or Fox). | Unexamined. |
| L28 | Cusum analysis: poem "indistinguishable" from Livingston, "clearly distinguishable" from Moore | Farringdon, 17 Jan 2001 | NYT/Foster texts | Not engaged by anyone; technique generally discredited (general knowledge). | Not part of the live debate. |
| L29 | Moore's "1827" for the 1837 *New-York Book* and his "gave the publisher" (when Hoffman's text follows the Sentinel) are "dubious"/"suspicious" | J17; *Style* 2017 (per N 2018) | The 1844 letter's wording | N 2018: an obvious misprint; Moore submitted the poems, which is "rock-solid bibliographic evidence" of an 1837 claim; Moore's imprecision about dates shows he had not yet received Tuttle's letter. | Minor. |

### B2. Arguments advanced for Moore (or against Livingston)

| # | Claim | Who (where) | Evidence offered | Rebuttal / counter-evidence | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M1 | The documentary chain: Holley's 1829 hint and 1836 statement ("not many months afterwards"); *New York American* 31 Dec 1836; *American Monthly* Jan 1837 ("the real author"); Hoffman 1837 with four Moore poems; ~25 printed attributions 1837-43 (Norsworthy's list) including Keese 1840 and Bryant 1840 anthologies; the Dec 1843 Intelligencer correction; Moore's 27 Feb 1844 letter; *Poems* 1844; four (five) autographs; T. W. C. Moore 1862; *Churchman* 1888 | St; Patterson; K App. D; N 2016-19; Jm | Newspapers, anthologies, manuscripts | Livingston side: Moore's 14-year silence and "trifle"; Foster's "coast is clear"; J: Moore relied on a broadside copy-text and no early autograph exists; the family learned only in 1859-62. J17: the 1844 letter "has strengthened the external evidence for Moore"; "several people who knew Clement Clarke Moore thought of him as author". | The strongest evidence in the case; conceded by Jackson to favour Moore "taken at face value". |
| M2 | Datable sources: Irving's *History* (1809; 1812/1821 additions incl. "laying his finger beside his nose"), Pintard's 1810 broadside, *The Children's Friend* (1821: reindeer, sleigh, "Old Santeclaus"), Scott 1815 | Nb (1996, 2001); K; Nk; N; Jm (pp. 209-12, 224-27); Fox | Verbal and iconographic parallels | J ch. 4: resemblances "not conclusive in themselves"; belief in Irving's influence "depends on having made a prior assumption about the poem's date"; VD: Irving knew Jonas Platt (Livingston's brother-in-law) in 1803. | Strong; makes any pre-1821 date a problem the Livingston side has not solved. |
| M3 | "dread" -- Foster's own Moore marker -- occurs in the poem at its turning point ("nothing to dread"); Moore 11-0 (24-0 with MSS) | Nb; N (2016, 2017: "to dread" as end-rhyme paralleled in Saratoga); A (Moore-only word) | Counts | J: content words unreliable for short texts without corpus-size correction. | Strong and unanswered in detail. |
| M4 | Other content-word markers: brain(s) 19-0, vision/s 15-1, "objects" 6-1, "lustre" 2-0, "wond'ring ear", "'kerchief" with "cap" (Saratoga), "coursers", "twinkle of the eye", "droll", "wink", "snug and tidy", "clatter/spatter" | Nk App. E; N 2016-17 | Concordances (Van Deusen's word database) | J17: "wondering eyes" commonplace; corpus 3:1; "a reliable means of using words like 'brains' and 'visions'" would have to be devised. | Suggestive; awaits a size-normalised test (Argamon's Moore-only words partly supply it). |
| M5 | "like" 8x in the poem (six in nine lines); Moore 132 vs Livingston 15; the epic simile ("As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly...") is a Moore device (To a Lady 1805, Mr. Chilton's Lectures, five in Saratoga, Sisters of Charity, Elphinstone) never used by Livingston | Nk 2003; N 16 May 2017 (deal-breakers 4-5) | Counts; examples | J p. 89 and J17: "like" is counted among Moore-favoured words yet the overall percentage still favours Livingston; the six-in-nine-lines cluster is "unique within either poet's work"; the hurricane simile "does not seem beyond Livingston" (Livingston mentions hurricanes twice, Moore never). | Strong qualitative point; Jackson's answer is that his aggregate wins. |
| M6 | Modals and other Moore words: should 38-3 (68-3), would 55-18 (137-18), could 76-18, hope 29-3 (56-3), soon 68-8, ere 17-2 (48-2; Livingston's two in the doubtful 1819 address), "Oh!" (Moore often, Livingston never) | N 28 Apr 2017; J17 (Mar) on "Oh!" | Counts incl. MSS | J17: already inside the frequency tables. | Unrefuted as counts. |
| M7 | Genre/length/mode: the poem has 542 words; Livingston's 54 poems >=100 words average 228 (12,303/54), only six exceed 400 (two of them doubtful Carrier's Addresses); Moore averages 642 (20,556/32; 824 with MSS); Livingston's narrative verse is confined to iambic fables and Anstey-style verse letters to adults; no fantasy in a real setting; Moore relishes narrative (Saratoga, *Charles Elphinstone* 13,670 words -- more than all Livingston's verse, 12,599) | N 16 May 2017 (deal-breakers 1-3); Nk Part 2 pp. 9-10 ("magical children's ballad" vs. verse epistle) | Jackson's own Table 13.1 | J: Livingston's 1791-1828 manuscripts burned, so the surviving corpus (mostly 1776-90) under-represents him; his "folk art" entertains; Moore's poems for children moralise. K (CBC): both men had "verve". | Strong but qualitative; the corpus-survival point is a genuine limit on all internal tests. |
| M8 | Moore's own light/child-directed verse: "From Saint Nicholas" (MCNY manuscript, letter-poem to daughter Charity, c. 1821, anapestic, St. Nick persona, near-rhyme plenty/empty), "The Pig and the Rooster" (783 words, 13 Norsworthy markers), "Lines Written after a Snow-Storm" (published anonymously in the *Troy Sentinel* 20 Feb 1824; beds/heads rhyme, "as the snow", "vision", "dance") | K; Nk; N 2017/2019; Jm pp. 19-20 | Manuscripts; newspapers | J17: the snow poem ends with a moral "far cry from that which inspired" the *Visit*; "Pig and Rooster" and "From Saint Nicholas" are used as controls and score Moore-like. | Establishes capacity; the 1824 anonymous Sentinel poem is a notable new fact (Moore used the same channel twice). |
| M9 | Independent computational tests point to Moore: Jerman's JGAAP (16 of 17 tests); Argamon's random-500-of-1000-feature similarity (x100), with five distractor poets, and Moore-only words "ere", "dread", "opening" vs Livingston-only "jolly", "chin", "broad" | Jm ch. 13; Fox 2023 | See A4 | None found. Caveats stated by the authors themselves: Argamon "would bet $100, not $1,000"; Jerman gives no per-test figures (N 2023); Argamon's Moore corpus included Van Deusen's transcriptions and one Fox transcription; no peer review. | The newest evidence; needs replication with cleaned corpora. |
| M10 | Negative evidence: Livingston, who published New Year's addresses and other verse, never claimed the poem though it was reprinted many times 1823-28 (including on the front page of the *Poughkeepsie Journal*, 16 Jan 1828, Foster's own find); no printing with his name in 40+ years of searching; none of his children made a public claim; the family's first written claims come 30-50 years after 1844 | St; K; N; Fox | Reprint history | VD/T/St: family reluctance to challenge a bishop's son; the family did not see Moore's name until 1859-62 (yet Sidney's grandson says "never brought up ... until after 1862"). | Strong. |
| M11 | Livingston's Dutch Reformed household did not celebrate Christmas or venerate saints; no Christmas reference in his papers except the 1773 "Happy Christmas"; Moore's Episcopal family kept Christmas "in high style" | Jm ch. 11 (pp. 273-80); Fox (Henry A. Livingston 1841) | Family papers; church practice | VD: 1773 letter; 1803 Carrier's Address "blithe Christmas" (attribution doubtful). | New; unanswered. |
| M12 | Character rehabilitation of Moore (letters, 1849 verse, eulogies; the enslaver charge traced to Patterson and debunked) | K; Nb; Fox 2021; N | Documents | -- | Neutralises Foster; not itself evidence of authorship. |
| M13 | T. W. C. Moore's 1862 letter is "the earliest and best witness letter of all", from a Livingston first cousin once removed who moved in the Butler/Hart circle | N 7 Feb 2018; Jm pp. 216-19 | N-YHS letter; Onderdonk trial testimony of Frances Butler (1844) placing T. W. C. Moore and Harriet Butler in one intimate circle | J p. 102 discusses the letter without noting the kinship; VD cites the same family only as a possible transmission route. | Strong; recognised only since 2018. |
| M14 | Moore-family witnesses (O'Conor deposition 1920; Mary Moore's 1855 calligraphed copy) | VD (as hostile witness); Nk 2019 | MCNY documents | Late and hearsay, as the Livingston letters are. | Symmetric with L14. |
| M15 | The Odell copy (Moore's godfather's family; 1824 watermark; among Moore poems and letters) is an "important early association" with Moore | N 2016 | New Brunswick Museum | J pp. 116-18, J17: its variants show it did not come from Moore; ch. 21 "trivializing" per N. | Contested; the copy's existence and early date are agreed. |

---

## C. Jackson (2016; 2017): data, methods, results, and the methodological criticisms

Sources for this section: Jackson's own summary on the henrylivingston.com data page [FULL], his replies of 3 Feb and 13/16 Mar 2017 [FULL], his 2013 statement [FULL], the *Style* abstract [EXCERPT], the book's table of contents [FULL], and page-referenced quotations in Norsworthy's posts [FULL]. Numbers not attributed to one of these are not available to me.

### C.1 Corpora

- **Livingston corpus**: "the Livingston corpus that had been established on Mary Van Deusen's 'Henry Livingston' website several years before I began my investigations", excluding the site's "Henry Plus" (possibly-Livingston) group. Listed in *Who Wrote*, pp. 164-72. Sixty-five poems are attributed to Livingston on the site (N); Jackson's Table 13.1 (pp. 65-67) lists 54 poems of >=100 words after excluding eleven shorter ones, totalling 12,303 words; the whole Livingston set is 12,599 words (N's figure from Jackson's data), 1,892 lines (data page). Only ten of the 54 exceed 300 words and six exceed 400 (the 1803 and 1819 Carrier's Addresses, "Crane & Fox" 460, "Vine & Oak" 428, "Letter to my brother Beekman" 408, "American Eagle" 530). Most survivors date from 1776-90 (the 1784-89 manuscript book) because, Jackson says, Livingston's autographs of 1791-1828 "perished in a fire (except those copied into his daughter Jane's poetry book)". The set includes the 1803 and 1819 Carrier's Addresses (Norsworthy: the 1803 address is probably by Isaac Mitchell, editor of the *Political Barometer*; only the 1787 address is in Livingston's manuscript book; attributions by Gertrude Thomas are "unsubstantiated") and verse paraphrases of Job, Habakkuk, Isaiah, Hezekiah and Aesop.
- **Moore corpus for developing the tests**: *Poems* (1844) -- "the texts he approved for final publication" -- plus the manuscript pieces "From Saint Nicholas", "To Fanny" and "To Clem" (Mar 2017 reply), minus three verse translations (two from Italian, one from Greek: the Petrarch sonnet, the Aeschylus *Prometheus* chorus, and per N the "Ode to Nice"); "The Mischievous Muse -- Translated" (from Da Ponte) was left in by "oversight". Norsworthy's arithmetic from Jackson's tables: 32 published poems totalling 20,556 words (2,873 lines per the data page).
- **Moore manuscript poems held back "for checking the tests"** (ch. 18): twelve manuscript poems of 1843-52 from Moore's MCNY notebook, "including the long 'Charles Elphinstone'" (blank-verse narrative, 13,670 words, datable 1851), "Irish Valentine" (590 words, anapestic), "For a Kiss" (anapestic), "Caroline's Album", "Newport Beach", "To Eliza, in England", "Valentine for Fanny French", "To Little Clem", and others; the Petrarch translation excluded. Held-back total per N: 38,714 words for 47 Moore poems including "Sand" and the MSS. **Omitted**: "Biography of the Heart of Clement C. Moore" (Jackson used only the 72% printed by Patterson, then agreed to add the whole once Norsworthy transcribed it, Jan 2017).
- **Text of the disputed poem**: the *Troy Sentinel* 1823 printing (ch. 1), which Jackson defends as closest to the author's copy; using *Poems* 1844 would change one Moore-favoured "that" and one Livingston-favoured "was" and nothing in the phoneme results (Mar 2017).
- **Transcriptions**: Van Deusen's, with some corrections by Jackson; "The" and "the", "And" and "and" counted as distinct words in the book (merged in the *Style* follow-up). Known transcription errors: Moore's "clad" as "glad", Livingston's "sempstress" as "seamstress" (N); Jackson: immaterial to the tests.
- ***Style* 2017 control corpus**: "a similarly-sized corpus of verse by contributors to the newspapers and journals in which he [Livingston] published" (Mar 2017 reply; abstract).

### C.2 Methods and headline results (in the book's order)

1. **Reindeer names, exclamations (ch. 3)**: documentary/orthographic argument that the Sentinel's "Dunder and Blixem", exclamation placement and nasal half-rhyme are authorial and Livingstonian (Table 3.1 of blitzen/blixem usages; Norsworthy shows the table omits Scott 1815/1820 and many blixen/blitzen examples).
2. **Sources (ch. 4)**: denies that Irving's *History* must be a source; the resemblances "not conclusive".
3. **Meter (ch. 5)**: Livingston wrote anapestic tetrameter far more than Moore (one-third of the manuscript book); Moore's four anapests serve as controls throughout.
4. **Attributive adjectives (ch. 7, Table 7.1, blocks of >=500 words)**: Moore uses far more; the poem has 16.236% attributive adjectives per total words; Moore's anapests 39.4 ("Pig and Rooster"), 36.0 ("From Saint Nicholas"), 27.8 ("For a Kiss"), 28.0 ("Irish Valentine"); at least five Livingston pieces 10.5-19.2 (p. 98). Jackson concedes meter "militates against the liberal use of adjectives" (pp. 97-98).
5. **Rhyme links (ch. 8)**: rhyme pairs of the poem found in each corpus (details not available; "Irish Valentine" snow/below recorded at p. 99).
6. **Shared three-word sequences (ch. 9)**: trigrams exclusive to one candidate; initially "tended to favour Livingston", "though the data were sparse"; after Norsworthy's additions Jackson's recount gives Livingston 3 vs Moore 9 (= the 3:1 corpus ratio) and he concludes the test is "ineffectual".
7. **Phoneme pairs (chs. 10-12)**: every word transcribed into Arpabet phonemes via the CMU pronouncing dictionary (work done by Van Deusen, Kosinski and Bates); a "phoneme pair" = last phoneme of one word + first phoneme of the next within a line. Chi-square tests over all pairs in either poet's top 100 by frequency yielded ten Moore-favoured (T/DH, T/F, T/S, Z/W, S/W, Z/T, IY/T, D/P, S/S, Z/CH) and ten Livingston-favoured pairs (AH/N, AH/F, AH/S, AH/B, AH/K, AH/L, AH/P, N/AH, Z/AO, Z/IH). Statistic: Livingston-favoured / (Livingston- + Moore-favoured) per poem; poems with fewer than 12 favoured pairs dropped (25 Livingston, 6 Moore), leaving 1,483 Livingston lines and 2,750 Moore lines. Means: Livingston 66.654, Moore 42.912, *Visit* 64.912 (Table 12.1; Figure 3, p. 132, shows the poem "around the middle of the Livingston distribution and outside the range for Moore"). Jackson grants that AH-initial pairs are "largely determined by rates of use of the definite and indefinite articles".
8. **Articles (ch. 13)**: "the"+"a" as a percentage of words: poem 11.439; Moore's anapests 3.271-9.322; some non-anapestic Livingston poems 11.6-12.5; Moore's highest rates in late non-anapestic MSS ("Caroline's Album", "Newport Beach").
9. **Very high-frequency words (ch. 14, Table 14.1, 500-word blocks)**: "that" (Moore-favoured; the poem has 17.347 "that" per 1,000 words in *Biography* -- a Moore-typical rate -- for comparison) and other stand-alone words; "to", "I", "is" excluded from stand-alone testing because t-tests showed no significant between-poet difference; Table 14.1 as printed misplaces four Livingston-block rows that belong to Moore (Jackson's correction, Feb 2017).
10. **Favorite expressions (ch. 15, Table 15.1)**: some, oft, many a, in vain, at length, that's -- 160 Moore vs 9 Livingston; "Moore averages one of his favorite locutions to every 129 words"; none in the poem. Criteria unstated (N).
11. **Common words that discriminate (ch. 16, Table 16.2)**: each poet's top-50 words; 26 words present in both and >=2 times in the poem ranked -- Spearman rho poem-Livingston .7638, poem-Moore .6633; then words used >=1.2x more by one poet (excluding those used in earlier tests) -- Livingston-favoured: I, his, my, her, on, as, is, was, at, thy, will, day, When, me, Where, While; Moore-favoured: to, from, your, for, they, be, With, this, our, not, which, so, would, For, it, heart, Of, are, we. Percentage of Livingston-favoured tokens per poem separates the corpora (t-test); the poem lies within Livingston's range and at the extreme of Moore's. Anapestic Livingston pieces average 53.4708 vs 64.8487 for the rest (significant, in the direction that weakens a meter explanation).
12. **Medium-high-frequency words (ch. 17, Table 17.1)**: the next 60 words by rank; 34 Livingston- and 37 Moore-favoured at the 1.2x criterion (only two between 1.2 and 1.3); poems with >=10 test words: Livingston mean 60.814 (range 30.000-89.474), Moore 29.489 (14.583-53.333), poem 53.704. Includes "like" and "should" as Moore-favoured. Anapestic vs other Livingston: 61.7204 vs 63.2948 (n.s.). Note 1 (p. 183): "a fair proportion" of these are content words.
13. **Combined Figure 4 (p. 133)**: all words in either author's top 110 meeting the 1.2x criterion, combining Tables 16.2, 17.1, 18.1, 18.2, 18.5 and per-poem "that" counts; the poem sits "around the middle of the Livingston distribution and outside the range for Moore". Later additions: *Biography of the Heart* scores 42.105 (Moore-typical); "The Writing of Hezekiah" 64.286 (Livingston-typical).
14. **Checking the tests (ch. 18)**: the twelve held-back Moore MSS "associated unequivocally with Moore"; "none was, on the full combination of tests, so consistently Livingston-like as 'The Night Before Christmas'"; the "regression effect" is invoked for the slight loss of discrimination on new data; shared-trigram checking was omitted (admitted, Mar 2017). No Livingston poems were held back, "because what mattered ... was to find out whether [the tests] yielded 'false positives' for Livingston".
15. **External evidence (chs. 19-21)**: the Moore "creation myth", the Livingston family version (pp. 110-12), the Odell copy (pp. 116-18), MacCracken's route (p. 119), the Tuttle broadside as printer's copy (pp. 173-4); Jackson's stated position: external evidence "taken at face value, favours Moore", but "the long-standing belief among descendants of Henry Livingston ... [need not] be groundless".
16. **Summary (ch. 23, p. 128)**: "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"; rates of common words and phoneme pairs "are largely beyond a writer's conscious control. They distinguish Moore's verse from Livingston's, and they classify The Night Before Christmas with the latter" (CBC quotation); for Moore to be the author he must have "slipped into a style that was not only atypical of his own verse but utterly typical of the very man who, according to his descendants, was the true author".
17. ***Style* 2017**: the same two discriminators applied Livingston-vs-contemporaries; poem again with Livingston; capitalisation merged.

### C.3 The methodological criticisms, and Jackson's answers

| Criticism | Raised by | Jackson's answer (where given) | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Question-begging premise**: the book opens (p. 11) and closes (p. 128) with the subjective judgment that the poem is a "misfit" in Moore, so the tests confirm a prior. | N 2016; Jm ("unacknowledged sources of scholarly bias"); K (CBC) | "It is perfectly normal and legitimate to have a theory and then objectively test it"; the tests could have falsified it. | Fair on both sides; the tests were designed after the theory, on corpora chosen by the Livingston advocate's site. |
| **Corpus composition (Moore)**: translations excluded but Da Ponte kept; *Biography of the Heart* omitted (with its "lustre of the day"); the twelve MSS incl. *Charles Elphinstone* "held back" so the discriminating word lists derive from published poems only. | N 2016, Feb 2017 | Translations are unsuitable for stylometry ("familiarity with the field"); holding back material is "best practice"; *Elphinstone* figures are reported (pp. 92-93) and are Moore-like; *Biography* will be added and scores Moore-like on Fig. 4. | Partly answered; the word lists themselves were never recomputed on the enlarged corpus in any published form I found. |
| **Corpus composition (Livingston)**: includes the 1803 and 1819 Carrier's Addresses and other unverified attributions (the two longest "Livingston" poems); the two "ere"s are in the 1819 address. | N Feb/May 2017; Jm ("inaccurate corpora"); N 2023 | 1803/1819 addresses "belong with Livingston rather than with ... his contemporaries" in the *Style* test; family transmission had "no obvious ulterior motives"; willing to try excluding them. | Open; no published re-run without them. |
| **Meter confound**: anapestic tetrameter inflates "the", "a", "and", AH-phonemes and depresses adjectives; Jackson's concession on adjectives (pp. 97-98). | N 2016 | Conceded for articles/adjectives ("of some efficacy but of less"); refuted for the main tests by splitting Livingston into anapestic vs other poems: phoneme pairs n.s. (p > 0.2); high-frequency words significant in the *opposite* direction; medium-high n.s.; Moore's anapests never reach the poem's article rate. | The strongest objection is genuinely addressed for chs. 12/16/17; but the check compares Livingston's anapests with Livingston's non-anapests, not Moore-in-anapests with Livingston-in-anapests, which is the comparison Norsworthy asked for ("isolate test results for 'The Pig and the Rooster,' 'Irish Valentine' and anything else Moore wrote in close to the same meter"). |
| **Genre/length mismatch**: a 542-word first-person fantastic narrative for children compared with rebuses, acrostics, hymn paraphrases and verse letters averaging 228 words. | N May 2017; K (CBC: "cherry pick"); Nk (ballad vs epistle) | Livingston "could enter into a child's world"; the surviving corpus is skewed by the fire; the disputed poem is unlike anything by either man ("The poem's subject matter is so original that in fact few trigrams link it to either author"). | Unresolved; a genre-controlled design (child-centred/narrative subsets; Moore's "From Saint Nicholas", "Pig and Rooster", "Snow-Storm" vs Livingston's fables and letters) was proposed by Norsworthy and not carried out. |
| **Function words only / "meaningless bits"**: no table of content-word frequencies; "brains", "visions", "dread", "like", "should" ignored or buried. | N 2016-17 | High-frequency words are the field's best discriminators for short texts (Burrows, Juola cited); content words need corpus-size normalisation; ch. 17 includes some content words. | Standard practice defends Jackson; but the strongest content-word evidence (M3-M6) runs the other way and has never been formally weighed. |
| **Selection of "favorite expressions"** without stated criteria. | N Apr 2017 | Not answered directly (would/should/like "treated" elsewhere). | Valid. |
| **Transcription and versions**: uncorrected transcriptions; counting "The"/"the" separately; using 1823 accidentals as authorial while treating Moore's 1824 "ivy bowers" as a misprint. | N Feb 2017 | Errors immaterial to counted words; capitalisation merged in *Style*; "Dunder and Blixem" "makes excellent sense" unlike "ivy". | Minor except for the accidentals argument, which underpins L3/L12. |
| **No independent replication; no blind or validity testing; data supplied by an interested party; researcher as "hired gun"** | Jm ch. 9 (as reviewed); Fox; N | 2013: "I hope other attribution scholars will try their own different approaches"; Mar 2017: suggests word-adjacency networks (Segarra et al. 2016) and Elliott-Valenza "modal distance". | The only third-party tests so far (Jerman's JGAAP, Argamon) reached the opposite result, using overlapping corpora; neither is peer-reviewed or fully reported either. |
| **Printing/typo errors** (Table 14.1 rows misplaced; "Bulmer", "Halteraick", "Blitzem", "Hackett", 1823 transcription slips, Sonne 1971/Neils) | N 2016-21 | Table 14.1 corrected in the Feb 2017 reply; others acknowledged. | Cosmetic, except Table 14.1. |
| **External evidence discounted**: the 1844 letter (unknown to Jackson when writing), the 1837 submission, Holley 1836, T. W. C. Moore's kinship, the Odell copy | N 2016-18 | Acknowledged the 1844 letter as strengthening Moore; maintains the internal/external conflict. | Jackson's final position (2017): "more research is needed". |

---

## D. Open questions the scholars themselves say would settle it

Quoted or closely paraphrased, with source.

1. **A written claim or a manuscript from Livingston's side.** Stevenson (1923): "there is no single written document extant to show that Henry Livingston ever claimed the authorship ... even after its appearance in the Troy Sentinel"; West (1920): "There is not extant a single written document which shows that Henry Livingston himself ever laid claim to authorship"; Patterson (1956): "Better proof will be needed ... not a word from his own pen"; Kaller (2004): "no record ... despite over 40 years of searches -- of any printing of the poem with Livingston's name"; Fox (2023): "unless somebody finds some pretty compelling documentary evidence pointing to Livingston".
2. **The pre-1823 Poughkeepsie newspaper printing that the family remembered** (Goodrich 1900: published "in a Poughkeepsie paper ... between 1780 and 1800"; Jennie Hubbard: "he sent it to be published in a Poughkeepsie paper ... the paper carefully preserved, but ... now lost"). W. S. Thomas "searched through old newspaper collections hoping to find the published version" (Van Deusen); Thomas (1919) published "in the hope that its publication may elicit new evidence"; Tryon (1920) hoped "further information ... may be drawn from hiding"; West (1920) hoped the testimony would let the question be "definitely settled". Kaller and Norsworthy treat the failure to find it after a century as decisive; Norsworthy adds that the 16 Jan 1828 *Poughkeepsie Journal* reprint could itself be the clipping Charles Livingston kept in his desk.
3. **Resolving the family's dates.** Stevenson: the 1804-05/1808 stories cannot both be true and Moore had no children then; Kaller: Catherine Breese died in Aug 1808; Jackson (2017) takes the letters seriously but offers no reconciliation. A dated, contemporaneous Livingston-family document from before 1844 would change the picture; none is known.
4. **Whether the 1823 accidentals ("Dunder and Blixem", the exclamation marks) are authorial.** Jackson's chapter 3 depends on it; Norsworthy's counter depends on two intermediate copies. A copy in Harriet Butler's or the album-keeper's hand, or Sarah Sackett's copy, would settle it; none is known.
5. **Re-running the stylometry with the fixes both sides accept**: Jackson (Mar 2017) agreed to add *Biography of the Heart*, to try excluding the 1803/1819 Carrier's Addresses ("It would be worth seeing how a Mitchell poem fares"), to merge capitalised forms, and named untried techniques (word-adjacency networks; Elliott-Valenza modal distance, "did well on 500-word blocks of verse"). Norsworthy (Feb 2017) asked for: all Moore verse including translations and MSS; a purged Livingston canon; corrected transcriptions; explicit handling of versions; counts of "everything, including all nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs", published so others can evaluate; and (May 2017) genre-matched subsets (Moore's anapests and child-directed poems vs Livingston's). Norsworthy (Dec 2023): "Future investigations using JGAAP can confirm if Jerman's findings are repeatable ... with more realistic corpora, minus unsubstantiated attributions to Livingston"; and "determine if Major Livingston of Poughkeepsie ever wrote more than one New Year's Day 'Carrier's Address'."
6. **Prevalidated, independently run methods.** Jerman (per Norsworthy/Fox): protocols "prevalidated" in Juola's sense, validity testing, independent researchers, an author profile; Jackson (2013): "when they are published I hope other attribution scholars will try their own different approaches ... It will surprise me if all reliable kinds of testing do not reach the same conclusions" -- a prediction now contradicted by Jerman and Argamon and therefore itself a testable open question.
7. **Reconciling internal and external evidence.** Jackson (Feb 2017): "I still cannot reconcile the external evidence for Moore's authorship ... with the internal evidence for Livingston's"; (CBC 2017): "quite likely that the matter can never be settled". Nissenbaum (2001): "By itself ... textual analysis doesn't prove anything", especially for a "literary sponge"; his proposed test is historical fit (Pintard/Irving/the 1820s), which the Livingston date fails.
8. **The chronology of sources.** Kaller/Nickell/Jerman: any Livingston date must explain the poem's dependence on Irving's 1821 "finger beside his nose" and the 1821 *Children's Friend* reindeer; Jackson denies dependence. A demonstration either way (e.g., a pre-1821 text with a reindeer-drawn St. Nicholas, or a rigorous source study) would settle the dating question.
9. **Stevenson's "two poems" hypothesis** (Livingston wrote a Christmas jingle c. 1805 and Moore wrote this one in 1822; the family conflated them) and Norsworthy's variant (a Carrier's Address remembered as the poem). Recovery of any Livingston Christmas or New Year piece read to the children c. 1805-10 would test it.
10. **What Holley knew and when** (MacCracken: "what evidence did the editor of the Troy Sentinel ... go upon?"). Holley's 1836 statement answers the "when" (within months); the "from whom" (Sackett/Butler) rests on Tuttle 1844 and Pelletreau 1897.

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## E. The earliest dated Livingston family claim, according to each scholar

| Scholar (year) | Earliest claim they date | What they rely on | Notes / how it has held up |
|---|---|---|---|
| W. S. Thomas (1919) | Undated: a tradition "taught them from infancy"; "his own children and grandchildren have borne written testimony" | Family letters he collected (1879-1919) | Gives no date for the first assertion; his own search for the newspaper printing failed. |
| Tryon (1920) | 1879 (Eliza Livingston Lansing's letter); Lossing's 1886 inquiry; 1900 Babylon letter | Thomas papers | Concedes burden of proof on the Livingston side. |
| West (1920) | 1865-70 (Thomas's father arguing with a Moore grandson at Churchill's Academy, Sing Sing); 1879 letter; 1886 Lossing; family belief "for a century" | Thomas papers, Montgomery letter | First to print the governess story; notes the 1804-05/Moore-unmarried contradiction. |
| Stevenson (1923) | "for more than a hundred years, the belief has persisted"; earliest document quoted is 4 Mar 1879 | Thomas papers | Concludes no written claim by Livingston exists. |
| Patterson (1956) | Thomas's thirty-year quest (c. 1910-41); Jennie Hubbard's undated statement | 1953 letter from W. Stephen Thomas | "No one, outside his family circle, appears to have heard of his having written the poem." |
| MacCracken (1958) | Lossing's inquiry "seventy-five years ago" (c. 1883-86); witnesses begin with Jane Paterson Thomas (d. 1870) and the 1879 letter | Thomas papers | Also relays Goodrich's 1900 claim of a printing "between 1780 and 1800". |
| Nissenbaum (2001) | "first made in the late 1840s at the earliest (and possibly as late as the 1860s), by one of his daughters, who believed that her father had written the poem back in 1808" | Foster's account | Notes there is "no actual historical evidence" and that Foster admits it. |
| Kaller (2004) | Eliza Brewer Livingston's recollection "In 1848, 1861, or even later (no one in the family knows)"; most likely triggered by the 1863 *Harper's Weekly* Nast printing; "The written Livingston family claims begin around 1870" | Family letters as summarised by Foster/Van Deusen | Points out earlier family datings (1780-1800, 1805, 1807) and the Breese/governess impossibilities. |
| Foster (2000) [SECONDARY] | Family "seem to have settled on Christmas morning 1808" (p. 237); "the external evidence ... depended on the recollections and anecdotes of his children and grandchildren" | Van Deusen's collection | Composition "Christmas 1807 or 1808" (p. 238, per RPO). |
| Van Deusen (site, 2003-16) | 1859: Eliza Brewer Livingston shown a "paper covered edition" with Moore's name (Denig, 14 Mar 1917); 1860/1862: Sidney's family/Jane Hubbard learn of it; 1865-70 Sing Sing; 1879 letter; 1886 Lossing; 1889 family correspondence; 29 Dec 1899 Cooper letter to the *Sun* and Babylon Henry's newspaper -- "the first public claim"; 5 Jan 1914 M. W. Montgomery letter to the *Sun* (earlier notes); 1917-20 Denig/Thomas letters; 1919-20 Thomas/Tryon/West | Witness letters | Babylon Henry himself wrote (1900) that "The question ... was never brought up, to my knowledge, until after 1862". |
| Jackson (2016; 2017) | "as soon as Livingston's descendants became aware, around 1860, that the poem was being attributed to Moore they expressed indignation" | Ch. 20 (pp. 110-12), Van Deusen's witness letters | Treats the letters as serious evidence; Jerman calls them hearsay. |
| Norsworthy (2016-23) | No public claim by any of Livingston's children ever; "The revival of the Livingston claim around 1920"; family belief traceable to c. 1860 only through later letters; the earliest *dated* Livingston-family statement about the poem is T. W. C. Moore's of 15 Mar 1862 -- for Moore | Newspapers; N-YHS | Also cites the *Churchman* (22 Dec 1888): "the only wonder is that it has not been claimed by a legion of would be authors". |
| Fox (2023) | "Around the time of Moore's death in 1863 ... a granddaughter of Henry Livingston Jr. ... saw a copy of the poem with Moore's name on it and cried foul ... recited it to his children in 1808 or so" | Secondary summary | Journalistic. |
| Jerman (2023) [SECONDARY] | Not recovered; treats all witness letters (from 1879) as "second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay" (pp. 227-36) | -- | -- |
| Wikipedia (2026) | 1859 discovery; 1899 "first public claim" | Van Deusen; Tryon | Reflects the Livingston site's chronology. |

**Synthesis.** Nobody has produced a Livingston-family assertion datable before 4 March 1879, and that letter itself says the family's "astonishment" came "many years after my father's decease". The only earlier *dated* events are (a) a schoolroom argument c. 1865-70 remembered by a participant's son, and (b) the family's own later statements that Eliza Brewer Livingston saw Moore's name in 1859 and Sidney's family in 1860/1862. Kaller's "around 1870" for the first written claims is consistent with the surviving letters; Nissenbaum's "late 1840s at the earliest" reflects Kaller's/Foster's "1848" option (the Wisconsin fire date, 1847-48, seems to have been conflated with the discovery date in some family accounts). All of these are decades after Moore's 1837 and 1844 claims and after Livingston's children had had twenty years (1823-44) of anonymous reprints and seven (1837-44) of attributed ones in which to object.

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## F. Verification register

**Read in full (copies in `docs/sources/`)**: Nissenbaum 2001; Stevenson 1923 (chapter); MacCracken 1958 (pp. 370-90); Thomas 1919; Tryon 1920; West 1920; Kaller's two web pages incl. all appendices; Kirkpatrick NYT 26 Oct 2000 (both pages); CBC 24 Dec 2017; Fox/Bloomberg 19 Dec 2023; NYSL Dec 2015; NYHS 22 Dec 2025; RPO 2005; the henrylivingston.com timeline, witnesses, quest, scholars (incl. Jackson's 2013 statement and Farringdon's 2001 letter), arguments, data and historical-articles pages; fourteen Melvilliana posts incl. Jackson's two 2017 replies, the 1844 Moore letter, the 1862 T. W. C. Moore letter, the 1823 Sentinel text, the pre-1844 attribution list, the Dunder/Blixem evidence, the trigram and favourite-expression counts, the five "deal-breakers", and the review of Jerman.

**Excerpts only**: Patterson 1956 (pp. 17-19, 112-13 via Norsworthy, 118, 167-71); Jackson *Style* 2017 (abstract); Jackson 2016 (TOC; the author's data page; page-cited quotations); Nickell (Appendix E and quotations); Wikipedia wikitext (for citations only).

**Not seen (secondary only)**: Foster 2000; Nissenbaum 1996; Nickell's *Manuscripts* articles and 2019 blog; Lowe 2000; Sonne 1972; Coffin 1973; Marshall 2002; Van Deusen 2001; Mann 2006; Kingery 2013; Jerman 2023; McColl 2022; Fox 2021; the UNB 2016 Odell post; the NYSL 2025 libguide; the Library of Congress blog of 22 Dec 2025 (archived copy unreadable); the Melvilliana Substack post of Jan 2026; the "Penry" item of 6 Dec 2024 (not re-verified); the mock-trial proceedings; the O'Conor deposition; the Odell manuscript; Holley 1829/1836 and all newspaper items (seen only as transcribed by Norsworthy, Stevenson, West or Kaller).

**Specific things I could not verify**: Foster's exact wording on "ere" (I found no evidence that Foster made an "ere" argument; "ere" enters the literature as a Moore marker via Nickell, Norsworthy and Argamon), on "Happy Christmas" beyond the NYT paraphrase, and on the exclamation marks beyond the NYT paraphrase; Jackson's rhyme-link results (ch. 8) and the exact contents of Tables 7.1/14.1/16.2/17.1 beyond the figures quoted above; whether Jackson's *Style* article changed any numbers; Jerman's per-test JGAAP results (Norsworthy says none are given); Argamon's feature list; the exact date and venue of the Chilton manuscript sale; Kaller's journal pagination (the NYSL catalogues "New-York Journal of American History, fall 2004", Kaller's page says the article appeared in the "Winter 2004" issue in my earlier notes).

**Access limits encountered**: Google Books, HathiTrust, JSTOR, Google Scholar, Project MUSE full text, Internet Archive lending copies of Foster, Nissenbaum and Jackson, sethkaller.com, henrylivingston.com and most newspaper sites blocked direct retrieval; Wayback Machine copies were used where possible (noted in each source file's header).