Perfect Additions
The Night Before Christmas
About the Author
Clement C. Moore was born and lived in New York City, where he was a prominent landowner and local figure. After studying at what is now Columbia University he was active as a real estate developer, helping to create the city’s Chelsea neighbourhood – it was open countryside owned by Moore until the 1820s. Today a park in Chelsea is named after him. Moore was also a professor of Oriental and Greek history at a theological college in New York, and served as a trustee of Columbia for several decades, but today is far better known for The Night Before Christmas, published anonymously in 1823 in the New York Sentinel and only acknowledged by Moore two decades later, claiming that he had written it to amuse his children for Christmas in 1822.