But so self-conscious is this scene—so close to the edge of silliness—that Irving himself suspected it might ring false to contemporary readers. For as the squire” mingled among the rustics, and was “received with awkward demonstrations of deference and regard,” Irving’s narrator observes (and reports to us) something that escapes the notice of his host: “I perceived two or three of the younger peasants, as they were raising their tankards to their mouths, when the Squire’s back was turned, making something of a grimace, and giving each other the wink, but the moment they caught my eye they pulled grave faces, and were exceedingly demure.” Irving surely wrote this little scene to protect his credibility with an 1820 audience, and his meaning would have been clear enough to the knowing reader: Despite all the precautions Squire Bracebridge had taken to do the job right, he had been unable to keep even the “decent part” of the local peasantry in “good humor” on Christmas Day.
The “Bracebridge Hall” stories were immensely popular, and they played an important part in restoring the interest of “respectable” Americans (and Britishers) in celebrating Christmas. Indeed, it was these sketches, together with the stories of Charles Dickens, that provided much of what a recent book terms the “enduring imagery of Christmas which is annually reiterated in Christmas cards and festive illustrations, where jovial squires entertain friends and retainers by roaring fires, and stout coachmen, swathed in greatcoats, urge horses down snow-covered lanes as they bring anticipatory guests and homesick relations to their welcoming destinations.”27
When the “Bracebridge Hall” stories were published in 1819, they set off something of a debate about whether reviving the old rural Christmas rituals would be enough to restore the fading authority of the English gentry. The issues were understood in just these terms. One essay, published in 1825, summarized them by asserting bluntly “that the merrymakings of the times of Elizabeth and the Stuarts originated solely in an instinctive [i.e., paternalist] understanding between master and man; that the rich encouraged them [i.e., the merrymakings] as a means of patronage and superiority, and that the poor accepted them as an oil to their chain, or a happy rivet of their dependence.” On those points, the essay argued, conservatives and reformers agreed. Where they differed was in their response: Conservatives believed “that the old times were the best because they were least free;” while reformers argued “that a merry season is dearly purchased by servility all the rest of the year.”
This particular writer (he remains anonymous) was a skeptic. He maintained that a revival of the old rituals was unlikely to have any effect, simply because the times themselves had changed. In former days, when “people believed any thing because a magistrate set his hand to it, the case was different;”
but now-a-days, bring rich and poor together as we please, roast as many oxen as there are villages to do it in, and let one general wassail-bowl set the hearts of great and small dancing all over England; and [still,] as long as there are Mechanics’ Magazines [i.e., to educate the poor] …, there is no fear that people will be too thankful for a sirloin of beef, or melt with maudlin souls into the overflow of a beer barrel. There is, in fact, no necessity for [their] accepting either.
“Sports may be revived,” this man concluded; “wassail bowls may abound; the poor may cultivate their strength and spirits with gymnastic exercise, and the rich assuredly be no nearer an undue influence.”28
In any event, Washington Irving’s vision of Christmas did not exactly offer a practical model for anyone who was tempted—and many must have been—to celebrate Christmas in this fashion. How could John Pintard, say, reproduce a ritual that Washington Irving himself found it difficult even to imagine for his readers? It is easy to sympathize with Pintard, who almost certainly read The Sketch Book and felt the power of Irvings vision. But it was easier for Irving to imagine such a scene than for John Pintard to duplicate it, even though it may have been the “Bracebridge Hall” stories that inspired—and finally frustrated—Pintard’s elaborate efforts during the 1820s to re-create an old-time New Year’s Day. Pintard would not be satisfied until he discovered what had happened, in the hands of his friend Clement Clarke Moore, to a figure that he himself had originally introduced—that is, of course, the figure of St. Nicholas.
As LATE AS 1826, Pintard did not associate Christmas itself with St. Nicholas (or with anything at all except attending church and what Pintard termed “solemni[ty]” and “devotional feelings”). Pintard went to church on Christmas in 1827, too; but there was something new that year: “We had St. Claas in high snuff,” Pintard noted, and he referred briefly to the “bon bons” his grandchildren had received. The following year, 1828, Pintard’s description was more elaborate:
All due preparations having been made by the children the preceding evening, by placing hay for his horses [!] and invoking “St. Claas, Gude Heylig Man,” he came accordingly during the night, with most elegant toys, bon bons, oranges, etc., all which, after rilling the stockings suspended at the sides of mother’s chimney, were displayed in goodly order on the mantle, to the ecstatic joy of [the children] in the morning, whose exhaltations resounded through the house.29
Pintard’s letters from each of the years 1830 through 1832 contain descriptions that were at least as extensive as this one. By 1831 he characteristically referred to the ritual as an “ancient usage,” adding that “St. Claas is too firmly riveted in this city ever to be forgotten.” And in 1832 Pintard concluded a very lengthy account of the children’s reactions to Santa’s visit with these words: “Happy golden age. All was joy and gladness.”30 That was all there would be; Pintard lived for another dozen years (dying at age 85), but he was becoming blind and seems to have stopped writing letters.
DURING THE TWO DECADES from 1810 to 1830, while Pintard shifted his energies from December 6 to January 1, then from January 1 to December 25, this much remained constant: The season was to be celebrated with members of his own social class. But one thing had changed nevertheless, and it was more important than the simple date of the celebration. Pintard had gradually moved from a celebration that took place in public (first at City Hall, with the New-York Historical Society, then on the city streets and in the houses of kinsmen and old acquaintances) to one that took place in private, in his own home, with his immediate family. Just as important, the new celebration focused on a single group within the family: young children.
In a very important way, such a child-centered event was a new thing. Before the nineteenth century children were merely dependents—miniature adults who occupied the bottom of the hierarchy within the family, along with the servants. But perhaps that was exactly the point, because in another way this was a very old thing. Making children the center of joyous attention marked an inversion of the social hierarchy, which meant that a part of the structure of an older Christmas ritual was being precisely preserved: People in positions of social and economic authority were offering gifts to their dependents. The ritual of social inversion was still there, but now it was based on age and family status alone. Age had replaced social class as the axis along which gifts were given at Christmas. The children of a single household had replaced a larger group of the poor and powerless as the symbolic objects of charity and benevolence. It was those children who became the temporary centers of attention and deference at Christmas, and the joy and gratitude on their faces and in their voices as they opened their presents was a vivid re-creation of the exchange of gifts for goodwill that had long constituted the emotional heart of the Christmas season.
It was just such an exchange that Washington Irving had evoked in “Bracebridge Hall” when he insisted that “there is something genuine and affectionate in the gayety of the lower orders, when it is excited by the bounty and familiarity of those above them; [how] the warm glow of gratitude enters into their mirth, and a kind word, and a small pleasantry frankly uttered by a patron, gladdens the heart of the dependent more than oil and wine.” During the 1820s such an exchange had particu
lar appeal for the urban upper classes, precisely because they were still residually sensitive to the need to demonstrate noblesse, especially during the Christmas season. But Irving, who continued to place the patron-client exchange in the older context of social class, was able to imagine it only with difficulty. Clement Moore, by translating the patron-client exchange from one between the classes to one between the generations, helped to transform it into a practical, simple ritual that almost any household could perform. And eventually, as we know only too well, almost every household would.
NOWADAYS many Americans believe, as I did until recently, that there was nothing new about “the night before Christmas” described in Moores poem—that the story it told was simply an old Dutch tradition brought to the New World in the seventeenth century and then, in the natural course of things, gradually Americanized. That is just what John Pintard would wish us to believe (and he may even have believed it himself).
But the preeminent scholar of St. Nicholas in our own day has shown that this could not have been the case. In an article published in 1954, Charles W. Jones argued forcefully that “there is no evidence that [the cult of Santa Claus] existed in New Amsterdam, or for [more than] a century after British occupation.” Jones pointed out that nobody has ever found any contemporaneous evidence of such a St. Nicholas cult in New York during the colonial period.31 Instead, the familiar Santa Claus story appears to have been devised in the early nineteenth century, during the two decades that ended in the early 1820s. It seems likely that a similar ritual, along with others, was practiced in parts of Holland during the mid-seventeenth century, on St. Nicholas’ Day, December 6. But Charles Jones makes a compelling case that this ritual did not cross the Atlantic, and that the Santa Claus who was devised in early-nineteenth-century New York was therefore a conscious reconstruction of that Dutch ritual—an invented tradition.
This does not mean that “the night before Christmas” belongs to Clement Moore alone. In fact, it was the work of a small group of antiquarian-minded New York gentlemen—men who knew one another and were members of a distinct social set. Collectively, those men became known as the Knickerbockers; the name comes from an immensely popular book published in 1809 by the best-known member of the group, Washington Irving. Irvings book, commonly known as Knickerbocker’s History of New York, was a brilliantly satirical allegory about life in the contemporary city that the author lived in, but it was written in the guise of a history of New Amsterdam in old Dutch times. Irving himself mentioned St. Nicholas twenty-five times in Knickerbockers History, including references to the saint’s wagon, his pipe (more of that later), and a line that read: “laying his finger beside his nose.” Irving even chose to have Knickerbockers History published on St. Nicholas’ Day. If it was John Pintard who introduced the figure of St. Nicholas, it was Washington Irving who popularized it. In the words of Charles W. Jones, “Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus…. Santa Claus was made by Washington Irving.”32*
The Knickerbocker set inhabited a special niche in the world of early-nineteenth-century New York. As a rule, its members were of British, not Dutch, descent. They belonged to the Episcopal Church, and, more particularly, to its ritually inclined High Church faction. They were part of the wealthy old aristocracy of the city (or at least they identified with it). And they were politically conservative, reactionary even—opposed to democracy (which they identified with mob rule) and fearful of both the working class and the new bourgeoisie. Indeed, they often failed to distinguish between these two groups, sometimes lumping them together with the general, yet quite telling, word plebeian.
For example, in his Knickerbockers History, Washington Irving disdainfully summarized in a single sentence an episode that clearly represented to his readers the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800: “[J]ust about this time the mob, since called the sovereign people … exhibited a strange desire of governing itself.”33 And in 1822 (the year “A Visit from St. Nicholas” appeared), John Pintard explained to his daughter just why he was opposed to the new state constitution adopted that year, a constitution that gave men without property the right to vote: “All power,” Pintard wrote, “is to be given, by the right of universal suffrage, to a mass of people, especially in this city, which has no stake in society. It is easier to raise a mob than to quell it, and we shall hereafter be governed by rank democracy…. Alas that the proud state of New York should be engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”34
In short, the Knickerbockers felt that they belonged to a patrician class whose authority was under siege. From that angle, their invention of Santa Claus was part of what we can now see as a larger, ultimately quite serious cultural enterprise: forging a pseudo-Dutch identity for New York, a placid “folk” identity that could provide a cultural counterweight to the commercial bustle and democratic “misrule” of early-nineteenth-century New York. The best-known literary expression of this larger enterprise is Irving’s classic story “Rip Van Winkle” (published a full decade after Knickerbockers History). But in the History, too, Irving pictured old New Amsterdam as a place of “filial piety” in which people thought and acted “with characteristic slowness and circumspection …; who adhere … to the customs … of their revered forefathers.” New Amsterdam was a serene place in which people (watched over by good St. Nicholas himself) “did not regulate their time by hours, but by [the smoking of] pipes.”35
CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE, COUNTRY GENTLEMAN
Which finally brings me to Clement Clarke Moore, the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” If we have any image of the man at all, it is apt to be of a benevolent figure, a scholarly but genial professor of Hebrew who stepped, just this once, out of his ivory tower to write, for his own children, those magical verses about what happened on “the night before Christmas.” He is a man who would appear to be as distant from the wider currents of history and politics as the figure of Santa Claus himself.
Clement Clarke Moore. This woodcut was made from one of the four portraits painted of Moore at different stages of his life. Good oil portraits were expensive, and only wealthy people could afford even one. This is from the last of Moore’s four portraits, done around 1850, almost thirty years after the writing of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” (Courtesy, Harvard College Library)
The image is not particularly misleading, and it is not my intention to dispel it. Still, Moore did have a real existence. He was born in 1779 (during the American Revolution) and died eighty-four years later, in 1863 (during the Civil War). And he fits perfectly the Knickerbocker mold: High Church Episcopalian, politically conservative, and quintessentially upper-class. Moore’s father was for thirty-five years Episcopal bishop of the diocese of New York, and Moore himself, though a layman, was an active and influential figure in the Church. (In fact, Moore held his professorship in a seminary that he himself had helped to establish.)
Moore was also conservative. His parents and grandparents had been closet Tories during the American Revolution—and open Federalists afterward. Moore’s own brand of conservatism took the form of an agrarian paternalism not far removed from that of a wealthy Virginia planter of the same generation. As a young man, Clement Moore himself published a series of tracts attacking both Jeffersonian radicalism and urban commerce, and to the end of his life he remained suspicious of democracy and other “reforms.” For example, in middle age he opposed the movement to abolish slavery. Indeed, at the time Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” in 1822, he himself owned five slaves.36
Moore’s ideology was well suited to his social position. He was an old-style country gentleman, a patrician man of leisure who inherited so much land (and the income it brought) that he never needed to take a job. Moore accepted his professorship when he was past 40, and for a token salary, in a seminary constructed on land he himself had donated for the purpose.37 He inherited his mother’s large Manhattan estate, originally located well to the north of New York City. The estate, which bore the name Chelsea, extended all the way from what
is now Nineteenth Street to Twenty-fourth Street, and from Eighth to Tenth Avenue. (This estate has given its name to the present-day Chelsea district of the city, just north of Greenwich Village.)
But when Moore was a young man this area was isolated and pastoral.38 John Pintard, who knew Moore well, wrote in 1830 that his Chelsea estate alone was worth $500,000. He also acknowledged Moore as his social superior, writing that even though he and Moore “have been always on the most friendly terms,… I have resisted all hospitalities when sitting in [his] elegantly furnished drawing room, for he is wealthy.”39
Still, Moore’s great wealth did not prove sufficient to insulate him from the pressures that transformed New York in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1811, as already noted, the New York City council approved a grid system of numbered streets and avenues that would crisscross the island above Fourteenth Street. By the time Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” New York was expanding north through Chelsea itself. In fact, late in 1818 something called “Ninth Avenue” was dug right through the middle of his estate (the land having been taken from him by eminent domain).40 The 1821 city directory lists Moore as residing, not at Chelsea, but near the corner of Ninth Avenue and Twenty-first Street.41 Eleven years later, in 1832, John Pintard visited Chelsea and mused about the changes that had overtaken the neighborhood, filled now (as Pintard put it) with “streets that have become regularly built up … where, but a few years ago, all was open country. It really surprised me to notice a dense population and contiguous buildings in what only 10 years since was merely a sparse city.”42 By the 1850s the entire hill on which Moore’s house stood had been leveled to make new land and bulkheads along the Hudson River waterfront, and Moore had built new homes for himself and his family.43
Moore was disturbed by the transformation of his city, and the cutting-up of his estate. In 1818, the very year that his property was bisected by Ninth Avenue (and just four years before he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas”), Moore published a pamphlet that protested against the relentless development of New York. In it he expressed a fear that the city’s beauty and tranquillity would be lost forever, and that its future was already in what he termed “destructive and ruthless hands,” the hands of men who did not “respect the rights of property.” City politics and policy were controlled by men Moore described as “mechanics and persons whose influence is principally among those classes of the community to whom it is indifferent what the eventual result of their industry may be to society.” New York was being turned over to a conspiracy, and Moore named its members: “cartmen, carpenters, masons, pavers, and all their host of attendant laborers.” Moore doubted that the city could (as he put it) be “save[d] from ruin.” And he was pessimistic about the future of his class: “We know not the amount nor the extent of oppression which may yet be reserved for us.”44
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