Let's Write about "The Night Before Christmas" back in the days before copyright!
a copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” that only recently turned up
A Famous Christmas Poem Could Sell for $500,000
Report published in The New York Times by James Barron.
Moore’s readers might not have recognized Irving’s St. Nicholas: He had a broad-brimmed hat. Moore made him more likable and more relatable. And, still later in the 19th century, the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the portly image that stuck in people’s minds.
Klarnet said he had found the copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” the fifth in Moore’s handwriting, among manuscripts that belonged to relatives of Adrian Van Sinderen, a prominent collector who died in 1963. It’s probably not surprising that Moore’s poem would have appealed to Van Sinderen: He wrote 25 books that had to do with Christmas, according to his obituary in The New York Times.
There is no known original manuscript of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Perhaps that is because Moore did not want his reputation as a serious academic brought down by something so frivolous. He taught Hebrew and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea. (Maine Writer- Ahhhh, 💕💕😍 , back in the days before copyright and royalties....so, in the history of publishing, this adorable story is truly a Christmas gift to the world.)
The original may have been what was sent to a friend in Troy, N.Y., who passed along the poem to a local newspaper that published it — anonymously — in 1823. Moore finally acknowledged authorship when he published a book of poems in 1844. (The family of Henry Livingston Jr. later claimed that Livingston had written it. Klarnet said the evidence pointed to Moore, because the editor of the Troy paper described the author of the poem as a resident of New York City. Livingston lived upstate.)
No one seems to know how Van Sinderen obtained the copy now at Christie’s, which has a discoloration on the first page, probably from where it had been pressed against a smaller piece of paper, Klarnet said.
The copy first showed up in a magazine called St. Nicholas in the early 1870s. Someone had apparently photographed the first page of the copy, and the magazine made an engraving from the photo, Klarnet said.
That tripped him up. At first, he suspected that the copy was merely a facsimile engraving. Only later, when he took a closer look and noticed changes in the tone of the ink from word to word, did he conclude that it was an actual handwritten copy.
“You see how much darker the exclamation point is?” he asked, pointing to the one after Vixen’s name. In an engraving, he said, the punctuation would not have looked like that.
“There it is, the beginning of the modern Christmas,” Peter Klarnet said, as I picked up a faded handwritten copy of a poem and squinted at the lines most of us know, starting with “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house.”
Klarnet is a senior specialist in Americana, books and manuscripts at Christie’s, which was preparing to sell the paper I was holding — for around $500,000. No wonder he was concerned about what else was in my hand. “Let’s watch that pen,” he said as his eyes locked on my ballpoint.
I put it down and went back to the ornate little loops and curls that formed Clement Clarke Moore’s familiar words.
The main character was “a right jolly old elf.” The R and the E start as far below the rest of the line as the J.
St. Nicholas’s supporting cast, the “eight tiny reindeer,” was introduced three lines from the bottom of the first page. Their names, all underlined, appeared on the second page. The last line — “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” — was also underlined.
“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” as Moore titled the poem, clinched the transformation of a Dutch saint into an American icon. Washington Irving, who created Rip Van Winkle and the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, wrote a satire poking fun at the Dutch who originally controlled New York. One of his characters, Peter the Headstrong, was a fairly obvious caricature of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had to hand over New Amsterdam to the British — who, in turn, renamed the city New York.
Klarnet is a senior specialist in Americana, books and manuscripts at Christie’s, which was preparing to sell the paper I was holding — for around $500,000. No wonder he was concerned about what else was in my hand. “Let’s watch that pen,” he said as his eyes locked on my ballpoint.
I put it down and went back to the ornate little loops and curls that formed Clement Clarke Moore’s familiar words.
The main character was “a right jolly old elf.” The R and the E start as far below the rest of the line as the J.
St. Nicholas’s supporting cast, the “eight tiny reindeer,” was introduced three lines from the bottom of the first page. Their names, all underlined, appeared on the second page. The last line — “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” — was also underlined.
“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” as Moore titled the poem, clinched the transformation of a Dutch saint into an American icon. Washington Irving, who created Rip Van Winkle and the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, wrote a satire poking fun at the Dutch who originally controlled New York. One of his characters, Peter the Headstrong, was a fairly obvious caricature of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had to hand over New Amsterdam to the British — who, in turn, renamed the city New York.
Klarnet said he had found the copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” the fifth in Moore’s handwriting, among manuscripts that belonged to relatives of Adrian Van Sinderen, a prominent collector who died in 1963. It’s probably not surprising that Moore’s poem would have appealed to Van Sinderen: He wrote 25 books that had to do with Christmas, according to his obituary in The New York Times.
There is no known original manuscript of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Perhaps that is because Moore did not want his reputation as a serious academic brought down by something so frivolous. He taught Hebrew and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea. (Maine Writer- Ahhhh, 💕💕😍 , back in the days before copyright and royalties....so, in the history of publishing, this adorable story is truly a Christmas gift to the world.)
The original may have been what was sent to a friend in Troy, N.Y., who passed along the poem to a local newspaper that published it — anonymously — in 1823. Moore finally acknowledged authorship when he published a book of poems in 1844. (The family of Henry Livingston Jr. later claimed that Livingston had written it. Klarnet said the evidence pointed to Moore, because the editor of the Troy paper described the author of the poem as a resident of New York City. Livingston lived upstate.)
No one seems to know how Van Sinderen obtained the copy now at Christie’s, which has a discoloration on the first page, probably from where it had been pressed against a smaller piece of paper, Klarnet said.
The copy first showed up in a magazine called St. Nicholas in the early 1870s. Someone had apparently photographed the first page of the copy, and the magazine made an engraving from the photo, Klarnet said.
That tripped him up. At first, he suspected that the copy was merely a facsimile engraving. Only later, when he took a closer look and noticed changes in the tone of the ink from word to word, did he conclude that it was an actual handwritten copy.
“You see how much darker the exclamation point is?” he asked, pointing to the one after Vixen’s name. In an engraving, he said, the punctuation would not have looked like that.
Labels: Clement Clarke Moore, James Barron, St. Nicholas, The New York Times
posted by Juliana L'Heureux at 8:28 AM
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