My husband, Michael Franklin, who has died aged 74, was a biographer of the Welsh polymath Sir William Jones (1746–94), whose perception into the concept that Indo-European languages have been interrelated first impressed comparative linguistics.
Jones was a puzzle: a colonial administrator in India however a radical pamphleteer at dwelling. In Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (2011), Michael took an empathetic strategy but by no means minimised his topic’s need for wealth and energy via the East India Firm.
Michael was fascinated by Jones’s attraction to japanese pluralism and syncretism, the combining of various beliefs, and contrasted this inclusive philosophy with the non secular intolerance of the current day. Jones’s scholarship produced cultural change: introducing the beauties of historic Indo-Persian tradition to the west, and stimulating a Bengali renaissance too. He had helped create an interlude of enlightenment between the rapacity of Robert Clive and the philistinism of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Macaulay in the direction of japanese tradition.
Michael additionally wrote a vigorous biography of the author and socialite Hester Thrale Piozzi within the Writers of Wales sequence (2020) and stimulated curiosity within the 18th-century English novelist Phoebe Gibbes together with his scholarly 2007 version of her novel Hartly Home, Calcutta. As well as he loved collaborative analysis as one of many normal editors of Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence On-line, a scholarly digital mission regarding Elizabeth Montagu, the 18th-century Shakespearean critic and patron of the humanities.
Michael was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, the youthful son of Irene (nee Daniels) and Leonard Franklin, who have been each employed by HMRC. He attended Cantonian highschool in Cardiff. We met as sixth-formers and married in 1972.
After graduating an English at College School, Cardiff, Michael accomplished an MPhil in medieval literature at York College earlier than changing into a trainer at Worcester ladies’ grammar faculty and, from 1983, head of English at St John’s faculty in Aberdare, south Wales.
Within the Nineties he left educating to analysis full-time. He edited a number of Jones’s writings, printed in 1995 as Sir William Jones: Chosen Poetical and Prose Works. This is able to type a part of his PhD. He attained his lifetime ambition of changing into an expert educational when he was appointed as a lecturer at Aberystwyth College after which, from 2000 till his retirement in 2020, at Swansea College, the place he was professor of English.
Michael is survived by me, our sons, Geraint and Ieuan, and two granddaughters, Elinor and Léna.
