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
A Visit from St. Nicholas city". The reported involvement of two women, Harriet Butler and Sarah Sackett, as intermediaries is consistent with the 1862 account of the poem's earliest transmission in which T. W. C. Moore describes two stages of copying, first "by a relative of Dr Moores in her Album" and second, "by a friend of hers, from Troy." Moore preferred to be known for his more scholarly works, but allowed the poem to be included in his anthology in 1844 at the request of his children. By that time, the original publisher and at least seven others had already acknowledged his authorship. Livingston