Julian Marshall

Julian Marshall (1836–1903) was a music and print collector and writer, born at Headingley, near Leeds, on 24 June 1836, the youngest of the five children of John Marshall (1797–1836), MP for Leeds from 1832 to 1835, and his wife, Mary, daughter of Joseph Ballantyne Dykes of Dovenby Hall, Cockermouth. He was educated at the Revd John Gilderdale's private school at Walthamstow, Essex, and at Harrow School (1852–4), where he was champion racket. His grandfather John Marshall of Headingley (1765–1845), MP for Yorkshire (1826–30), had established flax-spinning factories at Leeds and Shrewsbury, and on leaving school Marshall took part in the family business, though with no great liking, until 1861, soon after which he moved to London. In Leeds, Marshall, an amateur musician, had sung in the choir of the parish church when, under S. S. Wesley, it was being brought close to cathedral standards, and served on the committee of the first music festival in 1858.

Marshall's collection of prints, begun before he was twenty, included Italian, Dutch, German, and French as well as English items; catalogued by G. W. Reid of the British Museum, its sale at Sothebys in 1864 occupied twelve days and raised well over £8000. Books on the technique of engraving and catalogues of earlier sales of prints featured in a sale of items from Marshall's library at Sothebys in 1870. Although he retained his interest in prints, writing an introduction to the 1895 catalogue of British portraits in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, he subsequently collected principally printed and manuscript music. No catalogue of his collection as a whole exists, and its extent and nature is apparent only from his disposal of it. He sold part of his Handel collection, comprising early editions of printed music and librettos, to Arthur J. Balfour (later first earl of Balfour) in 1876; these are now in the National Library of Scotland. Marshall married Florence Ashton [see below] , daughter of Canon Thomas, vicar of All Hallows Barking by the Tower, on 7 October 1864; they had three daughters. He and his wife were founder members of the Musical Association. At a time when the association wanted more importance given to music in the British Museum Library, Marshall began to sell music manuscripts to the museum. In 1878 and—after protracted negotiations—in 1880–81 the museum acquired well over 400 volumes of music from him (BL, Add. MSS 30930–30934, 31384–31823). The manuscripts range from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. They include substantial groups of English sixteenth-century sources and of Handel scores (all copies), as well as autograph music by Purcell, Haydn (symphony no. 103), Mozart, and Beethoven (the major part of the sketchbook for the ‘Pastoral’ symphony). Marshall also owned the autographs of Mozart's C minor keyboard sonata and fantasia (now in the Mozarteum, Salzburg), and in 1880 attempted to buy the autograph of Don Giovanni from Pauline Viardot. Letters of musicians from Marshall's collection were sold in London in 1884; much of the remainder of his library was sold after his death in a two-day sale at Sothebys in 1904, and there was a further sale in 1922.

The most important of Marshall's writings about games is ‘’The Annals of Tennis’’ (1878), which had first appeared as a series of articles in The Field in 1876–7. He was among the major contributors to A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which appeared under the editorship of Sir George Grove in 1879–89. The longest of his articles was the entry for Handel, and there, as in some of his other contributions, he drew on items in his collection. The majority of his other contributions are for Italian singers of the baroque and classical periods, though he also contributed the article on the Mendelssohn Scholarships Foundation, of which he was secretary from 1871. Marshall died at his home, 13 Belsize Avenue, Hampstead, London, on 21 November 1903.

His wife, Florence Ashton Marshall (1843–1922), writer and composer, was born in Rome on 30 March 1843, and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. Like her husband she contributed to Grove's Dictionary, though on a lesser scale. Some of her articles survived unchanged into the fifth edition. She was elected an associate of the Philharmonic Society. Her biography of Handel was published in Hueffer's Great Musicians series in 1883, and her two-volume Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1889. She was the composer of two operettas, The Masked Shepherd (written by 1879) and the fairy operetta Prince Sprite (1897). Her published works include solo songs, part songs, and educational pieces. She conducted the South Hampstead Orchestra, a substantial enough body to perform under her direction in 1908 a Brahms symphony and the violin concerto of Saint-Saëns with Mischa Elman as soloist. She died on 5 March 1922; the last of her husband's collection was sold the same year.

References

*DNB
*A. Searle, ‘Julian Marshall and the British Museum: music collecting in the later nineteenth century’, British Library Journal, 11 (1985), 67–87
* A. H. King, Some British collectors of music, c.1600–1960 (1963)
*R. V. Taylor, ed., "The biographia Leodiensis, or, Biographical sketches of the worthies of Leeds" (1865)
*J. A. Sadie and R. Samuel, eds., The new Grove dictionary of women composers (1994)
* Wealth at death: £8974 12s. 1d.: probate, 9 Jan 1904, CGPLA Eng. & Wales