A
Visit From St. Nicholas
By Clement C.
Moore
To
view the actual manuscript click
here for page 1
To
view the actual manuscript click
here for page 2
To view the actual manuscript click
here for page 3
Clement Moore’s Christmas poem “A Visit from
St. Nicholas;” eventually became Known throughout the world by its
opening phrase, “Twas
The
Night Before Christmas” Both
titles are used in different versions of the classic.
On
Christmas Eve 1822, Reverend Clement Moore’s wife was roasting turkeys for
distribution to the poor of the local parish, a yearly tradition discovered
that she was short one turkey, she
asked Moore to venture into the snowy
streets to
obtain another. He called for his sleigh and coachman, and drove “downtown”
to Jefferson Market, which is now the Bowery section of New York City, to buy
the needed turkey. Moore composed the poem while riding in his sleigh; his ears
obviously full of the jingle of sleigh bells. He returned with the turkey and
the new Christmas poem. After dinner that evening, Moore read the new verses to
his family, to the evident delight of his children. Some months afterwards,
Moore’s children told a visiting friend of their father’s wonderful
Christmas verses. A Miss Butler copied the poem into her album and the next
December, probably unaware of Moore’s intention to keep his poem private, she
sent a copy to the Troy Sentinel. It was published there anonymously on December
23, 1823, under the editor’s title “A Visit from
St. Nicholas”. Moore’s authorship remained a secret until
1837,. when he allowed his name to be used when the poem was anthologized in The
New York Book
of Poetry. Later,
it was included in Moore’s Poems (New
York. 1844). a small collection of his verse which he published for distribution
to Mends and family. Since then, it has been reprinted countless times, loved by
children of all ages for over 100
years.
The
manuscript shown here is one of only four surviving copies of the
world’s most loved poem, The original draft has never been discovered, and
probably no longer exists. The three other manuscripts are at the New York
Historical Society, the Huntington Library in California, and the Strong Museum
of Rochester, NY.
Clement C. Moore (1779-1863), the son
of Benjamin Moore, second Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New York and President
of King’s College, graduated from
Columbia University in 1798. Moore’s family owned extensive lands in
Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, on the Hudson, and it
was Moore’s gift of some 60 acres of land in 1819, which made possible
the establishment of the General Theological Seminary, where Moore himself
taught Oriental languages, biblical learning and scripture interpretation from
1821 to 1850. An eminent lay theologian and scholar, Moore was the author of 4 Compendious
Lexicon of the Hebrew Language,
the first such work published in America and as a young man published
an anonymous criticism of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on
the State of Virginia. Moore lived not far from the new seminary (on
present-day 23rd Street,
between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in New York City).
