The son of Mary and Robert Lovell, his father’s early death left him with few prospects (significantly less than those of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s children, whose paternal relations were capable of greater generosity). In 1803 the money paid by the Lovell family for his education ceased. Southey and John May tried to get Robert Lovell Junior into Christ’s Hospital. They failed. The boy was apprenticed to a London printer and effectively separated from his mother, who lived with the Southeys in Keswick. The impact of this on his character seems to have been profound. In 1836 his first cousin Sara Coleridge described his lack of social skills: ‘From nine years old he has had to shift and scramble a good deal for himself, to bear up against a hard world which would have crushed <or injured> the frame it did not render to a certain degree tough & unyielding ... [he] never had the opportunity of acquiring a taste for domestic, scarcely even for social enjoyment: we ought not to wonder that he is deficient in many qualities which can only be fostered thereby.’ Robert Lovell Junior predeceased his mother. He disappeared whilst on a European walking tour in 1836.