The son of Thomas and Ann Julian, he was brought up as a Wesleyan Methodist, and became a Probationer minister in 1861 aged 22.
In 1864 he was dismissed from the ministry for ‘unworthy conduct in reference to a matrimonial engagement’ (the common wording for a ‘breach of promise’).
He moved to the Church of England, and trained for the priesthood at the University of Durham (1864-66) He was Vicar of Wincobank from 1876.
While at Wincobank he researched and prepared the three million words of the main work of scholarship for which he is renowned: A Dictionary of Hymnology, setting forth the Origin and History of Christian Hymns of all Ages and Nations, with special reference to those contained in the hymn books of English-speaking countries, and now in Common Use; together with biographical and critical notices of their authors and translators, and historical articles on national and denominational hymnody, breviaries, missals, primers, Psalters, Sequences, &c., &c., &c. Two common abbreviations are DoH and Julian.
In its preface he claimed that in order to attain ‘minute technical accuracy’, everything was meticulously researched, so that ‘The pursuit of this aim has very frequently demanded, for the production of one page only, as much time and attention, as is usually expended on one hundred pages of ordinary history or criticism.’ Ten thousand manuscripts were consulted; it involved the contributions of 43 others as well as Julian himself; and over a thousand people wrote letters to Julian assisting him in his research into a field that, according to Julian, numbered more than 400,000 hymns.