Background
Morford, Henry, , New Jersey 1823 1881 Male Author Journalist journalist and author, was the son of William and Elizabeth (Willett) Morford, who were residents of what is now New Monmouth, N. J. , where Henry was born.
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Henry Morford
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At sixteen he was already contributing poems to the New Yorker and to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, and in 1840 he published a thin pamphlet, Music of the Spheres, an immature poetical production showing the influence of Bryant.
Besides editing and managing this paper, he contributed to it frequent poems, and a series of supposedly autobiographical "Sketches of a Country Shopkeeper. "
He was for a time on the editorial staff of the New York Atlas.
Two years later he visited the Paris exposition, which he described in a volume called Paris in '67 (1867).
These short trips abroad suggested to him the possibility of publishing a guidebook to Europe which would benefit the person who had at his disposal but a few months for travel.
This idea bore fruit in Morford's Short-Trip Guide to Europe, first published in 1868.
In 1878 he again visited Europe, publishing a record of his experiences in Paris and Half-Europe in '78 (1879).
In January 1880 he established and edited the Brooklyn New Monthly Magazine, which continued until March 1881.
His work as an author was uneven.
Perhaps the best of his poetical work is The Rest of Don Juan (1846), a continuation of Byron's poem, in which he sometimes handles the ottava rima as skillfully as the English poet, although the effort as a whole is unevenly sustained.
Much weaker are the verses collected in Rhymes of Twenty Years (1859) and Rhymes of an Editor (1873).
Morford undoubtedly possessed the journalist's instinct to turn to literary use the events of the passing moment.
Three novels composed during the Civil War were addressed to a war audience--Shoulder-Straps (1863), The Days of Shoddy (1863), and The Coward (1864).
With the coming of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876, he published another novel, The Spur of Monmouth, whose subject was suggested no doubt by the battlefield near which he had lived as a boy.
These tales are labored, discursive productions, weak for the most part in characterization, and abounding with trite and improbable incident.
A drama, The Bells of Shandon, in which he collaborated with John Brougham, was produced at Wallack's Theatre, New York, in 1867, but has never been published (T. A. Brown, A History of the New York Stage, 1903, II, 164).
Morford is particularly remembered, however, for his guidebooks, whose popularity in his day is evidenced by the many editions through which they passed.
[T. H. Leonard, From Indian Trail to Electric Rail (1923), pp. 110-11; Franklin Ellis, Hist.
of Monmouth County, N. J. (1885); Trow's New York City Directory, 1858-82; H. S. Ashbee, "The Rest of Don Juan, " Bibliographer, July 1883; N. Y. Times, Aug. 7, 1881; bound file of the New Jersey Standard, Apr. 1, 1852-Apr.
1, 1854, in the N. Y. Hist.
Soc. ; four letters of Morford in the Hist.
Soc.
of Pa. ]
