A Visit from St. Nicholas
My father, as long ago as I can remember, claimed that his father (Henry, Jr.), was the author; that it was first read to the children at the old homestead near Poughkeepsie, when he was about eight years old, which would be about 1804 or 1805. He had the original manuscript, with many corrections, in his possession for a long time, and by him it was given to his brother Edwin, and Edwin's personal effects were destroyed when his sister Susan's house was burned at Waukesha, Wisconsin, about 1847 or 1848.
Still another bit of evidence is supplied by Mrs. Rudolph Denig, the wife of a retired commodore of the navy. Her grandmother was Eliza Clement Brewer, who married Charles Livingston, son of Henry Livingston, in 1826. The Brewers and the Livingstons were neighbors, and Mrs. Denig states that her grandmother told her that in 1808, while visiting at the Livingston home, she heard Mr. Livingston read the poem as his own.
But the greatest emphasis in the Livingston argument is laid on the internal evidence of the poem itself, on its resemblance to the acknowledged poems of Henry Livingston, and the contrast between it and anything else Dr. Moore ever wrote. Of the forty-four poems in Mr. Livingston's book, one third are in the same anapæstic meter as "A Visit from St. Nicholas," and they abound in the same tricks of rhyme and
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