John Hall-Stevenson

John Hall-Stevenson (1718March 1785), in his youth known as John Hall, was an English country gentleman and writer.

He is memorialised as "Eugenius" in Laurence Sterne's novels Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.

Life Hall-Stevenson was the son of Joseph Hall of Durham by his marriage to Catherine, sister and heiress of Lawson Trotter of Skelton Castle at Skelton-in-Cleveland, Yorkshire.

On 16 June 1735, at the age of seventeen, he matriculated at Jesus College, Cambridge as a fellow-commoner. He quickly struck up a close and lifelong friendship with Laurence Sterne, who was five years older. They referred to each other as cousins, but no kinship is known. Hall was precociously ribald and loved Rabelaisian literature. He left Cambridge without a degree in about 1738 and made the grand tour. He also claimed a friendship with Rousseau. which Gray called "absolute nonsense". Better known were his Fables for Grown Gentlemen (1761), and his Crazy Tales (1762, new editions in 1764 and 1780), which describes the meetings of his friends at Skelton, or "Crazy Castle".

Horace Walpole credited Hall-Stevenson with "a vast deal of original humour and wit", but Smollett and The Critical Review were contemptuous, with the result that in 1760, Hall-Stevenson abused Smollett and his associates in A Nosegay and a Simile for the Reviewers and Two Lyrical Epistles, or Margery the Cook Maid, to the Critical Reviewers. Hall-Stevenson's A Sentimental Dialogue between two Souls in the palpable Bodies of an English Lady of Quality and an Irish Gentleman (1768) was seen as a parody of his friend Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

He died at Skelton in March 1785, and his widow survived him until 1790. One of Hall-Stevenson's two sons, John, died unmarried, and the other, Joseph William Hall-Stevenson (1741–1786), died a year after his father, leaving a son, John Hall-Stevenson (1766–1843), who inherited Skelton Castle and rebuilt it. In 1788, he changed his name to John Wharton. He was Member of Parliament for Beverley between 1790 and 1820.

Hall-Stevenson's works were collected and published in three volumes in 1795.