Author: Lawrence, James Henry
Biography:
LAWRENCE, James Henry (1773-1840: ODNB)
Born on 26 Feb. 1773 and baptised at St. Marylebone, Westminster, London, on 6 Mar., he was the eldest son of Richard James Lawrence (1745-1830), a plantation-owner of Fairfield, Jamaica, and his wife Mary Hall (1747-1815) of Worcester—also from a family with estates in Jamaica--who had married at Harrow in 1768. Like his father, he was educated at Eton (1782-90), where he won the Montem prize for poetry in 1790. He published his first poem, The Bosom Friend (1791), as by “an Etonian” and entitled his final collection (1828, 1834) The Etonian Out of Bounds. Instead of following his father to Oxford, he chose the University of Göttingen in Germany, and spent most of the next twenty years on the Continent. He knew Schiller and Wieland and translated Kotzebue. His best known work, The Empire of the Nairs (1813), began as an article for a German magazine, but was then developed into a prose fiction published in German and translated by its author into French and English. In 1803 Lawrence and his father, travelling in France, were arrested and detained for some years at Verdun. Once he had made his escape by passing himself off as a German, he published in London a prose account of his experience, A Picture of Verdun, or, The English Detained in France (1810), which he then reworked as a play, The Englishman at Verdun, or, The Prisoner of Peace (1813). Lawrence never married; his wealth gave him freedom to travel and write as he chose. He claimed to have been made a Knight of Malta and was called “Sir James” or “the Chevalier Lawrence.” He attempted to make the case for English gentry as equivalent to Continental nobility in On the Nobility of the British Gentry (1824, frequently reprinted). He and his brothers shared grants of almost £3500 in 1835, compensation for the emancipation of 189 enslaved people on their Jamaican estate. He died at his home on Regent St., London, and was buried with his father at St. John’s Wood Chapel on 17 Sept. 1840. (ODNB 11 Dec. 2023; ancestry.com 11 Dec. 2023; LBS; findmypast.com 11 Dec. 2023; MR 77 [1815], 321-2; LES 19 Sept. 1840; R. A. Austen-Leigh, The Eton College Register, 1753-1790 [1921])
Other Names:
- James de Laurence
- James Henry de Laurence
- James Lawrence