[1] He was the son of Richard James Lawrence, a slave-owner of Fairfield, Jamaica, He was educated at Eton College, where he was Montem poet in 1790.
In 1803, in France with his father, he was arrested, along with other English residents and tourists, and was detained for several years at Verdun.
[4] Lawrence died unmarried 26 September 1840, and was interred with his father in the burying-ground of St. John's Wood Chapel.
[2] The "utopian romance" The Empire of the Nairs, Lawrence's major work, developed in stages.
In 1793 he published in Der Teutsche Merkur an essay on the Nair castes of Malabar, examining their customs of marriage and inheritance.