Welsh Journals

SIR William JONES. By Michael Franklin. Writers of Wales Series, University ofWales Press for the Welsh Arts Council, Cardiff, 1995. Pp. 135. £ 4.95. Sir William JONES, SELECTED POETICAL AND PROSE WORKS. Edited by Michael Franklin. University ofWales Press, Cardiff, 1995. Pp. xxx, 415. £ 45.00. Sir William Jones, poet, legist, political philosopher, linguist, comparative religionist, judge and imperial civil servant, was one of the most distinguished polymaths in an age of polymaths. The key to his many skills lay in his university education at Oxford, where he first showed his ability as a linguist, and his legal training at the Middle Temple. Jones's father had become vice-president of the Royal Society and so he was born into the ethos of the enlightened pursuit of knowledge. No-one would pursue it with more determination and energy. He died at the early age of forty-eight worn out by his endeavours. Before he became puisne judge on the Bengal Imperial Court, he had already secured a reputation as an oreintalist with the publication in 1771 of his Grammar of the Persian Language, and a place in enlightened literary and radical circles, being a member of both Johnson's circle and the club of Honest Whigs. He managed to rub shoulders with Johnson, Burke and Gibbon, and John Jebb, John Cartwright and John Wilkes, no mean feat. He was no doubt excellent company, not so much a trimmer, as a man of extraordinarily catholic tastes, who also embodied some of the intellectual and social confusions of an age of transition. As Michael Franklin shows in his elegant short study of Jones in the 'Writers ofWales Series', he was an intimate of aristocrats, a companion of gentlemen, and a friend of peasants. His ideas combined admiration for virtuous agrarian republicanism with an acceptance of the benefits of commercial society, democratic anti-colonialism with the promotion of imperial interests. He was a Welshman, a Briton, a Brahman, and a citizen of the world. The multiple nature of his identity is also indicative of the diversity at the heart of late-Enlightenment culture. What were weaknesses in terms of the coherence of Jones's ideas proved to be strengths in his understanding of Indian culture and religion. He found himself at home with the polycephalous nature of the Hindu religion. In India all his skill and sympathies came into play. All his life seemed to be a prelude to his work there. Only the ill-health of his wife, Anna Maria Shipley, marred this final decade of his life. He worked furiously, learning Sanskrit in the early morning before walking five miles to his daily judicial work. As Franklin notes, Arthur Devis's portrait, illustrated on the dust-jacket of his selection of Jones's work, shows the toll it took, but his achievement was immense. Franklin's discussion of these years is particularly felicitous. At the heart of