When John Marsh first came to my attention over thirty years ago, I little suspected that he would become a companion, even someone I looked upon as a friend, over a span of time covering nearly half my life. The word companion is not used lightly. As many others have discovered, to know Marsh in any depth is to feel instant and very real warmth for the man himself, quite irrespective of his major importance as a chronicler of his life and times. He is in his own right a hugely attractive figure: hardworking; assiduous in his practical concern for others; and devoted to his family, especially his poor sickly wife Elizabeth, yet not without human foibles that include a defence mechanism quick to be triggered. However, it is as an acute observer of the musical and social life of later Georgian and Regency England that Marsh remains of prime value to us today.

The Introduction to the first volume of the John Marsh Journals included a detailed introduction to the man and his writings, so I will not rehearse it here. For those readers not familiar with Marsh or that work, the following brief biography of Marsh must suffice. He was born in 1752, the son of a Royal Naval captain. After receiving his education in Greenwich and Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire, Marsh was articled to a solicitor in Romsey, Hampshire. At the conclusion of his apprenticeship he set up as a lawyer, first in Romsey, where he married Elizabeth Brown, then in partnership in Salisbury, at the time an important provincial musical centre, with a major annual festival and a series of subscription concerts. Marsh had a great deal more interest in music than he did in law and became fully involved in the thriving musical life of Salisbury. But in 1781 he inherited an estate near Canterbury in Kent, moving there two years later and taking over the city's less auspicious subscription concerts, which he raised to new standards. Disliking the life of a country gentleman, in 1787 Marsh moved with his growing family to a handsome town house in Chichester, the city that would remain his home until his death in 1828. Again, here in Chichester he revived the ailing concert life of the city, successfully directing the subscription concerts over a period of 25 years.