Three previous biographies of Jones are unsatisfactory. Teignmouth's Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones (1804) includes numbers of valuable letters, the holographs of many of which have been lost. Teignmouth records important personal information about his close friend Jones that only a contemporary could have known. But a check of his omissions and other changes in his publication of some of the Spencer letters at Althorp reveals his efforts to fit Jones into a near-model of Clapham evangelicalism, as is easily seen if one compares Teignmouth's version with the whole text as reproduced in Letters. Jones's free-thinking politics and religion are simply excised. Henry Morris's short Sir William Jones, the Learned Oriental Scholar (1901) goes even further toward reshaping Jones into a kind of Christian missionary. This view is quickly disproved when one scans through Jones's praises of Hinduism in letters that Morris probably could not have seen and might not have used anyway, in view of Morris's bias. Nor is Durgaprasanna Raychaudhuri's Sir William Jones and His Translation of Kālidāsa's “Śakuntalā” (1928) suitable as a biography, as this valuable study is restricted to one major aspect of Jones's Sanskrit work.

The first scholar to use the Spencer letters constructively was A. J. Arberry, whose incisive Asiatic Jones: The Life and Influence of Sir William Jones (1946) is, lamentably, only forty pages long. The 1946 bicentenary celebrations provided additional critical materials, which are unfortunately not integrated into a comprehensive biography.