MacDonald P. Jackson the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities (FNZAH). In 2009 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ). Jackson's most recent work was a year long examination of the disputed authorship of the classic poem "The Night Before Christmas", also called "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Jackson applied modern computational stylistics techniques to the corpora of verse left by both claimants, Clement Clarke Moore and Henry Livingston Jr., including a new test, statistical analysis of phonemes. His book, "Who Wrote" ""The Night Before Christmas"?" identifies the true author and makes a significant contribution to the
Clement Clarke Moore Christmas. Moore's estate, named "Chelsea", was on the west side of the island of Manhattan above Houston Street, where the developed city ended at the time. It was mostly open countryside before the 1820s. It had been owned by his maternal grandfather Maj. Thomas Clarke, a retired British veteran of the French and Indian War (the North American front of the Seven Years' War). Clarke named his house for the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London that served war veterans. The estate was later inherited by his daughter and Moore's mother, Charity Clarke Moore, and ultimately by grandson Clement Moore and