Yesterday we marked the 150th anniversary of Robert Louis Stevenson’s admission to the Faculty of Advocates with the first part of this discussion of the assertion once made by the Times Literary Supplement that to describe him as a lawyer is a howling error.

In what sense shall we say Louis Stevenson was a lawyer? His own word may carry some weight, at least in the private correspondence in which he designed himself as an advocate; even, or especially, to his beloved Mrs Sitwell’s future husband, to whom in 1875 he observed: “I am an Advocate now. If you ask me why that makes it better, I would remind you that … a little consequence goes a long way”.

Already by 1877 his legal learning had dwindled, but he could famously boast: “I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime.”

Years after passing advocate he certainly regarded himself as one, as in his narrative of a conversation with a passing John Bull in The Foreigner at Home:

Fifteen years after and half a world away from technically becoming a lawyer, in 1891 his light-hearted Samoan deed to Annie Ide designs him as “I, Robert Louis Stevenson, advocate of the Scots Bar”.

His finest biographer is J. C. Furnas, in Voyage to Windward – The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Furnas certainly judged Stevenson’s Father Damien Letter of 1890, defending the priest of Hawaii’s leper colony, the work of a lawyer, if pro bono on behalf of a dead man.

Writing about Germany’s disputed stake in Samoan affairs in the 1890s, Furnas held both the advocate’s rôles in public meetings and his writings to evidence his legal training in ways that would have delighted his professors at the Old College.

After his death in 1894, Fanny Stevenson drew the Faculty’s pension for a widow.

But does membership of Faculty equate to being a lawyer at all? Furnas attributed the father’s and son’s agreement to his going to the bar in part to its “lively Scots tradition of affinity with letters”.

Four decades earlier, Lord Cockburn judged the Court of Session’s vacations to be the fields in which much of our literature grew, affording advocates the leisure to write:

On this Whig and Tory agreed; Sir Walter Scott, companion of Stevenson’s grandfather on the annual tour of the lighthouses of Scotland, tells us that “a lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason”. Stevenson’s most eminent predecessors saw law and letters as a seamless garment,

Certainly to whatever extent he was a lawyer, he wrote much of them.

Daft John Nicholson and grave Gabriel Utterson were lawyers; murdered Glenure died in his lawyer’s arms; lower down the scale lies the shabby attorney Bellairs in The Wrecker, “a small, unseemly rag of human-kind”; and plainly Parliament House brought to the writer’s mind both Lord Advocate Prestongrange (“a politician who”, said Chesterton, “has not altogether ceased to be a man”) and Lord Justice-Clerk Weir: “He did not try to be loved, he did not care to be; it is probable the very thought of it was a stranger to his mind.”

How different from the real Lords Weir; how different indeed from all modern Senators.

Weir was inspired by Lord Braxfield, of whose likeness in the Advocates’ Library Stevenson gives a striking assessment in Some Portraits by Raeburn, prefiguring his own depiction of Weir: “It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person … than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices”.

And however unpopular the profession may be, Furnas held him to be “fond of law and lawyers”, while his characters had some regard for them: “I often think the happiest consequences seem to flow when a gentleman consults his lawyer, and takes all the law allows him”, David Balfour is told.

Stevenson himself, gone west, recalled: “I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles with the face of a captain going into battle and his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.”

When Long John Silver plotted armed battle (overheard by Jim Hawkins in the apple-barrel) he feared sea lawyers’ retribution, but Silver was a wrong’un so that was only right, even allowing that it probably was not licensed attorneys that he had in mind.

In Kidnapped young Balfour is also told that Stewart lawyers “all hing together like bats in a steeple” in Edinburgh.

Be that as it may, I owe to Lord (Angus) Stewart the suggestion that Stevenson’s punctuation was unconsciously modelled on his training in written pleading (personal communication), so that the semi-coloned structure of a petition’s prayer may be discerned in such sentences from Travels with a Donkey as: “She waited the table with a heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; her great grey eyes were steeped in amorous languor; her features, although fleshy, were of an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke of dainty pride; her cheek fell into strange and interesting lines.” Let the reader judge for himself.

Some of Stevenson’s Parliament House connections are waters that have run into the sand. If memory serves, Lord Davidson told us he had conversed with a member of Faculty who had in turn talked of Stevenson with a sheriff who still remembered RLS in Parliament House, and in not wholly flattering terms. If the reader can give the details of that or similar links with the past, then correspondence is invited.

For what it is worth, when I was born to the tenants of the lodge-house below Glencorse Old Kirk, where Stevenson saw Lord President Inglis a fortnight before he passed advocate, my parents’ landlord there was still an Inglis; John’s great-nephew.

Perhaps Stevenson was only technically a lawyer. But technicalities matter; as Lord Fullerton brilliantly expounds in Young v. Leith (9 D. 932), they provide the certainty and consistency which meld arbitrary instances into a coherent whole.

Not arbitrarily have so many Scots writers also been lawyers: Henryson, Dunbar, Maitland, Drummond (well, almost), Arnot, Boswell, Tytler, Scott, Jeffrey, Cockburn, North, Aytoun, McCall Smith, McIntyre, Moffat and O’Rourke form only the head of a list to which readers will add.

Stevenson was a lawyer. If facts are glaring and amusing blunders, then there is much howling to be had.

Yet the rank is but the guinea’s stamp; we can leave it to a Senator to assay the metal. Lord Guthrie again:

The author thanks Jane Condie, Morag Ferguson, Louise Moyes, Helen Robinson and Angela Schofield, librarians of the Advocates’ Library, for their help, and John Macfie of 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, for his comments on a draft of this article. Any errors are the author’s fault.

• Michael Upton is an advocate, mediator and arbitrator, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (FCIArb) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (FSAScot).