During the progress of our “Collection” through the press, we had, by a special appointment, an interview with Mr. John Morgan, a street author, and who may be said to be the oldest of his peculiar class. “I’m the last one left of our old crew, Sir,” he observed during our conversation. He is now upwards of 70 years of age, and formerly wrote for “Old Jemmy” Catnach, with whose personal history he is well acquainted, and still continues to write for the “Seven Dials Press.” A street ballad from his pen will be found at page 103 of our work. In allusion to Mr. John Morgan, the writer of an article on “Street Ballads” in the _National Review_ for October, 1861, makes the following remarks:--
“This ballad--‘Little Lord John out of Service’--is one of the few which bear a signature. It is signed ‘John Morgan’ in the copy which we possess. For a long time we believed this name to be a mere _nom-de-plume_; but the other day, when making a small purchase in Monmouth Court, we were informed, in answer to a casual question, that this is the real name of the author of some of the best comic ballads. Our informant added, that he is an elderly, we may say old, gentleman, living somewhere in Westminster; but the exact whereabouts we could not discover. Mr. Morgan followed no particular visible calling so far as our informant knew, except writing ballads, by which he could not earn much of a livelihood, as the price of an original ballad, in these buying-cheap days, has been screwed down by publishers to somewhere about a shilling sterling. Something more like bread-and-butter might be made perhaps by poets who were in the habit of singing their own ballads, as some of them do, but not Mr. Morgan. Should this ever meet the eye of that gentleman (a not very probable event, we fear), we beg to apologise for the liberty we have taken in using the verses and name, and hope he will excuse us, having regard to the subject in which we are his humble fellow-labourers. We could scarcely avoid naming him, the fact being that he is the only living author of street ballads whose name we know. That self-denying mind, indifferent to worldly fame, which characterised the architects of our cathedrals and abbeys, would seem to have descended on our ballad-writers; and we must be thankful, therefore, to be able to embalm and hand down to posterity a name here and there, such as William of Wykeham, and John Morgan. In answer to our inquiries in this matter, generally we have been told, ‘Oh, anybody writes them’ and with that answer we have had to rest satisfied. But in presence of that answer, we walk about the streets with a new sense of wonder, peering into the faces of those of our fellow-lieges who do not carry about with them the external evidence of overflowing exchequers, and saying to ourselves, ‘That man may be a writer of ballads.’