More than two centuries after former Governor of Bengal, and Jones's friend, Lord Teignmouth presented to Lady Jones the Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones (1804) she had asked him to write, and which became a prefatory volume to a second edition of her late husband's Works (1807), Sir William Jones continues to elicit reverential tributes. Michael J. Franklin, already the author of a short biography, Sir William Jones (1995), in the “Writers of Wales” series, and the editor of Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works (1995), inscribes a new, beautifully produced and handsomely illustrated, volume in this tradition. Franklin's stated intent is to show that Jones's “wisdom and visionary projects,” including an unfulfilled plan to “recommend universal toleration” on the basis of a putative theism shared by all nations, still have exemplary value for the modern world (p. ix).

After Garland Cannon's full biography, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones (1990), the present volume is less another biography than a study of salient aspects of Jones's legacy. Yet, the narrative proceeds in a generally chronological sequence from Jones's birth, at the beginning of the second chapter, to his death, at the end of the penultimate. This core is wedged between two chapters that present Jones as a mover in the kinship of nations and as a standard bearer for Indian pluralism.

Chapter 1, on Jones's alleged discovery of the Indo-European family of languages, unfortunately lacks contextualization in the history of linguistics such as is provided for his literary works. Western travelers, missionaries, and colonials in India had long pointed to the kinship of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other European languages with increasing sophistication, incrementally adding morphological to lexical evidence. Jones's contribution was that, instead of promoting one language as the parent of the others, he suggested that they stemmed “from a common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” The final chapter highlights the confluence of literary and cultural interests Jones and some of his contemporaries, Indian and British, displayed, against a stark background of current episodes of communal strife. Jones's appreciation of Arabic and Persian literature antedated his residence in India, and he maintained it with a lasting fascination and a wish to visit Persia, Shiraz in particular, on the return journey to Europe he planned. In India, his interest in Sanskrit derived, as it did for many of his fellow western scholars, from a quest for the most ancient cultural sources. In his primary function as a judge, Jones sought no syncretism, but fully endorsed, directed, and enforced separate codes of law for Hindus and Muslims. In the eighteenth century or now, delight in literary treasures of different provenances and in distinct languages, and pleasure in finding instances of convergence, is no palliative for social and political conflicts.

Chapters 2 to 5 cover Jones's life before his departure for India. Franklin discusses Jones's early work on Persian language and literature and his Republican politics. Passing lightly over Jones's tutorship of Viscount Althorp, the future Earl Spencer, he focuses on Jones's connection with Wales and the impact it may have had on his radicalization. Jones had been born in London, the son of a Welsh father who died when he was three years old. He was raised by his English mother and further educated at Oxford. His discovery of the “Celtic Fringe” came as a young lawyer outbound to offer representation to clients on the Carmarthen Circuit. His Whig principles and support of the American Revolution long delayed an appointment he eagerly sought to the Supreme Court in Calcutta. How he accommodated these views to his role as a colonial judge in the service of the British king is at the heart of S. N. Mukherjee's Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (1968). Chapters 6 to 8 in Franklin's book deal with the Indian period in Jones's life and work. They focus in turn on his founding the Asiatic Society and his pivotal role in its scholarly organ, Asiatic Researches, along with his contributions to Francis Gladwin's more recreational Asiatic Miscellany; on the European success of his translation of Kālidāsa's Abhijñānaśākuntala; and on his daily life as a judge and scholar in Calcutta.

The primary strength and new import of Franklin's study reside in the application of his talent as a close reader of literary texts. A student of British Romanticism and its interface with representations of India, Franklin weaves a rich tapestry of illuminating excerpts from, and analyses of, works in prose and poetry. We learn much about what Jones read, in languages from Welsh to Persian and Sanskrit, and how he reacted; about his favorite authors, and passages that resonated with him, and how they fitted in, or shaped, his own views and taste. We are repeatedly treated to quotes from Jones's own poetic formulations of his thoughts. Franklin also examines the ways in which Jones sought, in his translations and imitations of Sanskrit and Persian texts, to introduce their contents in ways that he considered more suitable for European readers, with a particular concern for an assumed extreme delicacy of ladies' eyes and ears. Although Jones shared with his wife an abiding interest in Indian flora, he famously ranted against Linnaeus' sexual nomenclature, which he thought made of botany an unfit pastime for a “well-born and well-educated woman” (p. 249). It is now an article of professional ethic for scholars to translate texts as fully, faithfully, and forcefully as a second idiom will allow. Jones felt and acted differently. He considered Sufi poetry and the Gītagovinda, among other poems, eminently worthy of being made known beyond their place of origin, but he found it imperative to introduce them to the West in muted tones. He viewed his charge less as one of accuracy and acceptance of different approaches to the divine and of observance of diverse esthetic forms, than as that of a “cultural mediator” (p. 273), who bent and reshaped expression to accommodate western norms and the sensibility of readers of his time and class. Jones's translations, let alone his imitations, of oriental texts are active re-creations, re-articulations, and re-flections, not mirror images, of the original works, and have to be appreciated as works of art of his own along with other poetic works of his that had no such inspiration.

Another feature of immense interest is the attention Franklin pays to a score of law cases that Jones took on as an attorney in Britain or that came before him as a judge in India. This is where we are usefully reminded that scholarship and poetry were only avocations, in which Jones indulged in the margins of his professional mandate. Reviewing these cases allows us also to appreciate how Jones wrestled with the challenges posed by issues that impacted people in various walks of life and were embedded in a wider spectrum of society than the genteel sliver to which he and other writers belonged.

Some puzzles, or ironies, remain in Jones's legacy. An acclaimed poet in his lifetime, he is no longer enshrined in the hall of fame of British Romantics, a fact that Cannon and Franklin find regrettable and strive to redress. As David Ibbetson observed in his contribution to the commemorative volume, Sir William Jones 1746–1794, edited by Alexander Murray (1998), recent works of legal biography and history tend to regard Jones as primarily an Orientalist, even though “law was very much the centre of his life” (p. 19). Scholars of English language and literature strike the same note, heralding him as “Oriental Jones” in the title of Cannon's biography, and “Orientalist Jones” in that of Franklin's study under review. Yet, to date, no scholar of Asian languages and literatures has chosen to make of Jones the subject of a book-length memoir.