It was a retired professor in New Zealand, MacDonald P. Jackson, who did the computer study, and there's also a wikipedia page about him.
Most of that Wikipedia article comes from my website. I prepared the data that went into my husband’s computer programs. We laid out the data to make it easy for Mac to pull out information. Then either Mac or Paul, at Mac’s instruction, would run statistical tests. That sequence repeated for YEARS!
Ah well, thanks for the info. I don't see how it can help in the particular task I had in mind, and one of which I think you too would be very interested in the outcome.
James McClure ring a bell? :)
For history, this is Mac’s email to me that got the second phase of the attribution research started. He thought it was a small job until I started shoving data to him. First he was overwhelmed, then he got excited. Then he went to town on it. It was the most exciting period since the 2000 period when I was criss-crossing the country to collect data. But this time I got to stay at home and do it all on the computer.
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8 DEC 2011
Dear Ms Van Deusen,
Henry Livingston certainly comes across as a thoroughly likable man. And that is true of the personality implicit in his poetry. His moving “God Is Love” sums him up: he was full of love for everything and everybody in the world around him. I admire his warmth, empathy, bonhomie, eye for detail, and good-hearted wit. There’s an endearing delicacy about the poems on the death of the pet wren (in the tradition of Catullus’s on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow - a poem that he refers to in one of his own) and
of the little dog Belle. He is a poet who relishes the essential being of all living creatures. He refers to Lawrence Sterne, the author of {Tristram Shandy}, as “The author of Shandy, all laughter and glee / Whose pencil from gall was forever kept free”. He himself is not ALL “laughter and glee” - his epitaphs and elegies are heartfelt, and his accounts of the year’s events in his New Year addresses are realistic - but he is remarkably free from “gall”.
Nobody could say the same about Clement Moore’s verse, which, in contrast, is that of a satirist and moralizer. And whereas Livingston?s poems teem with detailed concrete references to individual persons, animals, birds, insects, and things, Moore’s tend towards the abstract and generalized. Livingston’s verse shows many signs of the lively, whimsical fancy, and the narrative skill that could create ?The Night Before Christmas?. Moore’s, at least in {Poems} (1844), does not. Livingston knows how to shape a poem - beginning, middle, and end - whereas Moore is inclined to just meander on and on, when he should have stopped long ago.
I don?t see how anybody with a shred of literary-critical judgment could imagine that Moore?s undated ?From Saint Nicholas? (”What! My sweet little Sis, in bed all alone”) piece could strengthen his case. It is about as different in every way from ?The Night Before Christmas? as chalk from cheese. Livingston doesn’t deal in “moral lessons”: he deals in joy, compassion, and celebration. He doesn’t “instruct” children, he blesses them. And Moore’s “piece of fun”, “The Pig and the Rooster”, isn’t “fun” at all.
No doubt Moore loved his wife and children, made generous philanthropic use of his wealth, and was much less of a Grinch than Don portrayed him (and the accusation that he claimed to be the translator of the Merino book evidently won?t stand up), but there is no evidence in his verse of the imaginative zest of ?The Night Before Christmas?.
May I ask a few questions?
(1) Moore’s champions mention several of his pieces of light verse - including some in anapaests - in The Museum of the City of New York. Do you happen to have copies of any of these? Or have any idea how I could get copies without travelling to New York? I could ordewr photocopies but I don’t know what I’d be requesting photocopies of.
(2) How certain are you that the {Sentinel} broadsheet served, though presumably indirectly, as printer’s copy for “The Night Before Christmas” in Moore’s {Poems}? The reindeer names are italicized in both, but is this italicization peculiar to broadsheet and {Poems}? Moore penned in the Blixem/Blitzem change on the broadsheet. Did he pen in his other substantive changes - “leaves” to “leaves that”, “was flung” to “he had flung”?
(3) Are the HL poems on your website available in any form that might enable me to download them and run them through a Concordance programme?
Incidentally, there are quite a few errors in the texts of the poems, some perhaps going back to original printings. Would there be any point in my compiling a list of these for you?
Sorry to be so long-winded. But your website has given me a great deal of pleasure, and I have a habit of getting interested in authorship problems.
Yours sincerely
Mac Jackson