My husband, Michael Franklin, who has died aged 74, was a biographer of the Welsh polymath Sir William Jones (1746–94), whose insight into the idea that Indo-European languages were interrelated first inspired comparative linguistics.
Jones was a puzzle: a colonial administrator in India but a radical pamphleteer at home. In Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (2011), Michael took an empathetic approach yet never minimised his subject’s desire for wealth and power through the East India Company.
Michael was fascinated by Jones’s attraction to eastern pluralism and syncretism, the combining of different beliefs, and contrasted this inclusive philosophy with the religious intolerance of the present day. Jones’s scholarship produced cultural exchange: introducing the beauties of ancient Indo-Persian culture 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 towards eastern culture.
Michael also wrote a lively biography of the writer and socialite Hester Thrale Piozzi in the Writers of Wales series (2020) and stimulated interest in the 18th-century English novelist Phebe Gibbes with his scholarly 2007 edition of her novel Hartly House, Calcutta. In addition he enjoyed collaborative research as one of the general editors of Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online, a scholarly digital project concerning Elizabeth Montagu, the 18th-century Shakespearean critic and patron of the arts.
Michael was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, the younger son of Irene (nee Daniels) and Leonard Franklin, who were both employed by HMRC. He attended Cantonian high school in Cardiff. We met as sixth-formers and married in 1972.
After graduating an English at University College, Cardiff, Michael completed an MPhil in medieval literature at York University before becoming a teacher at Worcester girls’ grammar school and, from 1983, head of English at St John’s school in Aberdare, south Wales.
In the 1990s he left teaching to research full-time. He edited a selection of Jones’s writings, published in 1995 as Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works. This would form part of his PhD. He attained his lifetime ambition of becoming a professional academic when he was appointed as a lecturer at Aberystwyth University and then, from 2000 until his retirement in 2020, at Swansea University, where he was professor of English.
Michael is survived by me, our sons, Geraint and Ieuan, and two granddaughters, Elinor and Léna.
