A Famous Christmas Poem Could Sell for $500,000

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” that only recently turned up. We’ll also get details on a lawsuit by the father of Jordan Neely, the 30-year-old homeless man who died in a chokehold on the subway last year.

“There it is, the beginning of the modern Christmas,” Peter Klarnet said as I picked up a faded handwritten copy of a poem and squinted at the lines most of us know, starting with “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house.”

Klarnet is a senior specialist in Americana, books and manuscripts at Christie’s, which was preparing to sell the paper I was holding — for around $500,000. No wonder he was concerned about what else was in my hand. “Let’s watch that pen,” he said as his eyes locked on my ballpoint.

I put it down and went back to the ornate little loops and curls that formed Clement Clarke Moore’s familiar words.

The main character was “a right jolly old elf.” The R and the E start as far below the rest of the line as the J.

St. Nicholas’s supporting cast, the “eight tiny reindeer,” was introduced three lines from the bottom of the first page. Their names, all underlined, appeared on the second page. The last line — “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” — was also underlined.

“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” as Moore titled the poem, clinched the transformation of a Dutch saint into an American icon. A generation earlier Washington Irving, who created Rip Van Winkle and the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, wrote a satire poking fun at the Dutch who originally controlled New York. One of his characters, Peter the Headstrong, was a fairly obvious caricature of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had to hand over New Amsterdam to the British — who, in turn, renamed the city New York.

Moore’s readers might not have recognized Irving’s St. Nicholas: He had a broad-brimmed hat. Moore made him more likable and more relatable. And, still later in the 19th century, the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the portly image that stuck in people’s minds.

Klarnet said he had found the copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” the fifth in Moore’s handwriting, among manuscripts that belonged to relatives of Adrian Van Sinderen, a prominent collector who died in 1963. It’s probably not surprising that Moore’s poem would have appealed to Van Sinderen: He wrote 25 books that had to do with Christmas, according to his obituary in The New York Times.

There is no known original manuscript of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Perhaps that is because Moore did not want his reputation as a serious academic brought down by something so frivolous. He taught Hebrew and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea.

The original may have been what was sent to a friend in Troy, N.Y., who passed along the poem to a local newspaper that published it — anonymously — in 1823. Moore finally acknowledged authorship when he published a book of poems in 1844. (The family of Henry Livingston Jr. later claimed that Livingston had written it. Klarnet said the evidence pointed to Moore, because the editor of the Troy paper described the author of the poem as a resident of New York City. Livingston lived upstate.)

No one seems to know how Van Sinderen obtained the copy now at Christie’s, which has a discoloration on the first page, probably from where it had been pressed against a smaller piece of paper, Klarnet said.

The copy first showed up in a magazine called St. Nicholas in the early 1870s. Someone had apparently photographed the first page of the copy, and the magazine made an engraving from the photo, Klarnet said.

That tripped him up. At first, he suspected that the copy was merely a facsimile engraving. Only later, when he took a closer look and noticed changes in the tone of the ink from word to word, did he conclude that it was an actual handwritten copy.

“You see how much darker the exclamation point is?” he asked, pointing to the one after Vixen’s name. In an engraving, he said, the punctuation would not have looked like that.

Weather

Expect a sunny day with a high of 35 degrees. At night, it will be partly cloudy with temps around 30.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Dec. 9 (Immaculate Conception).

The latest New York news

UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. shooting

What we know: The manhunt continued as investigators chased leads in the search for the gunman who fatally shot the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare on a Midtown street. The suspect wore a hooded jacket and a smile in some surveillance photos.
Insurance anger: The shooting unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
Silencers: The gunman appeared to have used a silencer, a tightly regulated firearm accessory that has long been associated with Hollywood hit men but is rarely seen in real-life murders.
A suspect’s backpack: Peter Dering, the founder and chief executive of Peak Design, says he called the police tip line on Wednesday after receiving a wave of messages showing the suspect carrying a distinctive backpack — one made by his company.

More local news

“City of Yes” housing plan: Moving to address the city’s housing crisis, the City Council approved zoning changes that could clear the way for 80,000 new homes. Housing experts and election officials caution that it is only a first step.
Pedestrian deaths: A high school football coach who complained about a dangerous intersection in the Bronx in 2017 was hit by a car and killed yards from that same intersection. He was one of three pedestrians killed in traffic last weekend.
More than a night at the museum: The most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, a stegosaurus that the billionaire Kenneth Griffin bought for $44.6 million, has a new home: the American Museum of Natural History.

Jordan Neely’s father sues Daniel Penny

The father of Jordan Neely, the 30-year-old homeless man who died last year after being put in a chokehold in a subway car, filed a lawsuit against Daniel Penny, who choked his son.

Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, filed the suit accusing Penny of assault, as a jury in Manhattan continued deliberations in his trial on manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges. If found guilty, he could face up to 15 years in prison.

Zachery has maintained a quiet but relatively consistent presence during the trial, often leaving the courtroom when video footage of Neely struggling in the chokehold was played. In his lawsuit, which has no bearing on the trial, Zachery accused Penny, 26, of causing Neely’s death through “negligence, carelessness and recklessness.” The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for physical assault and battery.

Thomas Kenniff, one of Penny’s lawyers, said that his team remained “focused on seeing Mr. Penny’s criminal case through to acquittal.”

Penny, a former Marine and architecture student, was on his way to the gym when he got on an uptown F train in Manhattan. Neely, who had also boarded the train, began yelling, throwing his jacket on the floor and striding through the car, according to witnesses. Penny stepped in, witnesses said, and put Neely in a chokehold and then forced him to the floor and held him there.

Neely had been estranged from his family, including Zachery. Neely moved in and out of shelters and hospitals and was on a roster informally known as the Top 50, a list of homeless people in New York who stand out for the severity of their troubles and their resistance to accepting help. The list is overseen by a task force of homeless outreach workers from city agencies and social-service nonprofits.

METROPOLITAN diary

Ride Share

Dear Diary:

I had been living in the city for about a year and was slowly shedding my pleasant Midwestern manners in favor of some much-needed New York chutzpah. It was raining, and I was trying to hail a cab to the Lower East Side during rush hour. I knew it was a long shot.

Suddenly, one pulled up. Just as I was about to get in, a man appeared out of nowhere and opened the passenger door on the opposite side.

I was in a classic New York City conflict I had seen in movies and TV shows.

We immediately started to bicker over whose cab it was. The cabby was getting increasingly annoyed, as were the people trying to use the crosswalk we were blocking.

Exasperated, I finally let my guard down.

“Where are you going?” I asked my enemy.

“East Village,” he said.

“I’m going to the Lower East Side,” I said. “Get in.”

I climbed in and sat down. Slowly and reluctantly, he got in on the other side.

We sat in silence for the first block but eventually called a truce and shook hands when we parted ways.

— Dave Quantic

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Bernard Mokam and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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