# Is "A Visit from St. Nicholas (The Night Before Christmas)" by Clement C. Moore a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of A Visit from St. Nicholas (The Night Before Christmas) by Clement C. Moore (Henry M. Onderdonk, 1848) is identified by: The 1848 Onderdonk is a humble square chapbook of sixteen pages, cheaply bound in a paper wrapper lettered "Santa Claus," illustrated throughout with wood engravings by Theodore C. US-only throughout — no UK or foreign-language edition is in play.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- The 1848 Onderdonk is a humble square chapbook of sixteen pages, cheaply bound in a paper wrapper lettered "Santa Claus," illustrated throughout with wood engravings by Theodore C. Boyd — the first time the poem carried a full suite of illustrations as a book in its own right
- There are no edition statements or printing keys to read; identification rests entirely on the imprint (New York: Henry M. Onderdonk, 1848), the Boyd cuts, and the sixteen-page wrappered format
- A genuine textual test exists: the 1848 chapbook follows the punctuation of the 1836 Rural Repository / 1838 Parley's Magazine line — "Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer! now, Vixen! / On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Dunder and Blixen!" — rather than the 1823 Troy Sentinel's "Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen, / On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem;"
- Only a handful of copies survive in institutional collections; no copy appeared in the 2006 Sotheby's sale of the Jock Elliott Christmas collection
- Publisher imprint reads Henry M. Onderdonk
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Clement C. Moore |
| Publisher | Henry M. Onderdonk |
| Year | 1848 |
| True first | US edition |
| Format | Children's / illustrated |
| Key point | The 1848 Onderdonk is a humble square chapbook of sixteen pages, cheaply bound in a paper wrapper lettered "Santa Claus," illustrated… |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
The 1848 Onderdonk is a humble square chapbook of sixteen pages, cheaply bound in a paper wrapper lettered "Santa Claus," illustrated throughout with wood engravings by Theodore C. Boyd — the first time the poem carried a full suite of illustrations as a book in its own right. There are no edition statements or printing keys to read; identification rests entirely on the imprint (New York: Henry M. Onderdonk, 1848), the Boyd cuts, and the sixteen-page wrappered format. A genuine textual test exists: the 1848 chapbook follows the punctuation of the 1836 Rural Repository / 1838 Parley's Magazine line — "Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer! now, Vixen! / On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Dunder and Blixen!" — rather than the 1823 Troy Sentinel's "Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen, / On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem;". Only a handful of copies survive in institutional collections; no copy appeared in the 2006 Sotheby's sale of the Jock Elliott Christmas collection.

## Is this the true first?
US-only throughout — no UK or foreign-language edition is in play. The poem's true first appearance in print is the Troy Sentinel (Troy, New York), 23 December 1823, p. 3, published anonymously as "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas"; the 1848 Onderdonk is the first separate/book edition and the first illustrated edition, NOT the poem's first printing. Two intermediate landmarks matter for precedence: Moore was not publicly named as author until The New-York Book of Poetry (New York: George Dearborn, 1837), and the poem first appeared in a book of Moore's own authorship in his Poems (New York, 1844, pp. 124-127). A ca. 1830 Troy Sentinel broadside carrier's address with a Myron King woodcut is the poem's first appearance as a separate sheet and its first illustration.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Reprint and facsimile traps dominate this title. Onderdonk reused the Boyd cuts in The Evergreen (December 1849) and rights passed to Spalding & Shepard for their own 1849 chapbook of the poem (New York, 1849) — same cuts, different imprint. Dover Publications reproduced the 1848 edition in 1971, and a ca. 1919 "reprint of the first [sic] publication" of the Troy Sentinel text (held at the Library of Congress) is routinely mistaken for the 1823 original. Anything not a sixteen-page wrappered chapbook bearing the Henry M. Onderdonk 1848 New York imprint is a later issue or a facsimile.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *A Visit from St. Nicholas (The Night Before Christmas)* by Clement C. Moore a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/a-visit-from-st-nicholas-the-night-before-christmas
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.