He and his brother James between them donated £5000 – equal to half of the actual building costs – to the fund for the construction of Essex Street Chapel, the headquarters of British Unitarianism.

He wrote The Progress of a Century; or, The Age of Iron and Steam (1886), The Pope and the Bible (1888) and A Short History of Lighting from the Earliest Times (1895).

Lawrence became most famous as an advocate of Baconian theory, to which he was converted after reading Ignatius L. Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram.

His writings were also notable for the virulence with which he heaped abuse on William Shakespeare of Stratford: England is now declining any longer to dishonour and defame the greatest Genius of all time by continuing to identify him with the mean, drunken, ignorant, and absolutely unlettered, rustic of Stratford who never in his life wrote so much as his own name and in all probability was totally unable to read one single line of print.

He sent copies of his book to public libraries in Britain and to schools, prompting expressions of concern from Shakespeare scholars who believed unwary readers would be misled.

[9] John Sladek also showed that the word could also be anagrammatised as I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch, thus "proving" that Shakespeare's works were written by Ben Jonson.

[10] Durning-Lawrence also claimed that the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare contained visual codes pointing to the secret authorship.

[16][17][18] The authenticity of Cowell's "Reflections" was accepted by Shakespearean scholars for many years, but was challenged in 2002–2003 by John Rollett, Daniel Wright and Alan H. Nelson.

Rollett could find no historical traces of Cowell, the Ipswich Philosophic Society, or its supposed president, Arthur Cobbold.

[19] In 2010, James S. Shapiro declared the document a forgery based on facts stated in the text about Shakespeare that were not discovered or publicised until decades after the purported date of composition.