In 1897, Dr. Philip O’Hanlon, a coroner’s assistant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was asked a question by his then eight-year-old daughter, Virginia, which many a parent has been asked before: whether Santa Claus really exists. O’Hanlon deferred. He suggested Virginia wrote asking the question to one of New York’s most prominent newspapers at the time, The Sun, assuring her that “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” The response to Virginia’s letter by one of the paper’s editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, remains the most reprinted editorial ever to run in any newspaper in the English language and found itself the subject of books, a film and television series. In his response Church goes beyond a simple “yes of course” to explore the philosophical issues behind Virginia’s request to tell her “the truth” and in the process lampoon a certain skepticism which he had found rife in American society since the suffering of the Civil War. His message in short there is a reality beyond the visible.
