George Alfred Lawrence, educated at Rugby, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with honors 1850; called to the bar at the Inner Temple 1852; but devoted himself chiefly to literature. His novels were published anonymously. 1. Guy Livingstone; or, Thorough, Lon., 1857, p. 8vo; 4th ed., 1862…. 2. Barren Honour, 1862, 2 vols. p. 8vo. 2d ed. same year. 3. Border and Bastile, 1863, 8vo. 4. (Ed.), A Bundle of Ballads, Lon., 1863, sq. 16mo. 5. Maurice Dering; or, The Quadrilateral, Lon., 1864, p. 8vo; new ed., 1869. 6. Sans Merci; or, Kestrels and Falcons, Lon., 1866, 3 vols. p. 8vo; new ed., 1869, 1 vol. 12mo. 7. Brakespeare; or, The Fortunes of a Free-lance, Lon., 1868, 3 vols. p. 8vo. 8. Sword and Gown, Lon., 1868, p. 8vo; new ed., 1870. 9. Breaking a Butterfly; or, Blanche Ellerslie’s Ending, Lon., 1869, 3 vols. p. 8vo. 10. Anteros, Lon., 1871, 3 vols. p. 8vo. 11. Silverland, Lon., 1873, p. 8vo…. 12. Hagarene, Lon., 1874, 3 vols. 8vo.

General

  In 1857 he astonished novel-readers by his “Guy Livingstone, or, Thorough,” with its deification of strength and very questionable morality. The hostile critics depicted the hero as a mixture of the prize-fighter and the libertine, while the admirers of the book praised the disregard of conventionalities and personal daring of both the hero and the author, and a report that in the work the author had described his own boyhood and college life lent an additional piquancy to the book. It had a large sale, and from this time forward Lawrence produced a work of fiction nearly every alternate year. One of the best of these was “Sword and Gown,” 1868, which has a coherence and an air of probability hardly to be found elsewhere in his writings…. In his numerous books Lawrence’s style is always vigorous, and he is never dull.

  “Guy Livingstone,” which was very popular, and much denounced as the Gospel of “muscular blackguardism”—a parody on the phrase “muscular Christianity,” which had been applied to and not unwelcomed by Charles Kingsley. The book exhibited a very curious blend of divers of the motives and interests which have been specified as actuating the novel about this time. Lawrence, who was really a scholar, felt to the full the Præ-Raphaelite influence in art, though by no means in religion, and wrote in a style which is a sort of transition between the excessive floridness of the first Lord Lytton and the later Corinthianism of Mr. Symonds. But he retained also from his prototype, and new modelled, the tendency to take “society” and the manners, especially the amatory manners, of society very much as his province…. That Lawrence’s total ideal, both in style and sentiment, was artificial, false, and flawed, may be admitted. But he has to a great extent been made to bear the blame of exaggerations of his own scheme by others; and he was really a novelist and a writer of great talent, which somehow came short, but not so very far short, of genius.