Troy's Holiday Whodunnit 2024 - Henry Livingston vs Clement Moore as Poets of "Night Before Christmas"

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Posted on 12/15/2024 12:00:28 PM PST by mairdie

A 30 min documentary put together for a charitable event in Troy NY, where Night Before Christmas was first published in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823. For years it was assumed to be written by Clement Moore, a professor at a theology school and one of the richest men in NYC. Then, in 1859, the family of Henry Livingston began making known the family story of having seen the poem written and heard it performed by their father and grandfather years before the publication. Every 20 years the media rediscovers the controversy between a poet with no other decent poetry and an obscure Revolutionary War major who spent his spare time writing and drawing for anonymous publication.

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I became the Livingston descendant researching the controversy and making it public in 2000. I've worked with English lit Professor Don Foster at Vassar and Shakespearean scholar Professor Emeritus McDonald Jackson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. For over 10 years, I traveled collecting documentation for Don, and worked with Mac to statistically analyze the phoneme pairs of both men and the poet of the poem. Phoneme pairs describe the last sound of one word and the first sound of the next. It corresponds to the movement of your tongue in your mouth as you recite aloud. Mac statistically proved that the favored sounds of Henry and the Christmas poet were similar and that the favored sounds of Clement Moore were statistically different. With that methodology, he was able to conclude that Henry Livingston was, indeed, the poet of Night Before Christmas.

1 posted on 12/15/2024 12:00:28 PM PST by mairdie

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