The Times Literary Supplement once averred that to describe Robert Louis Stevenson as a lawyer was “a howler” (11 June 2004, p. 14). Chambers’ Dictionary defines “a howler” as “a glaring and amusing blunder”.

On this day 150 years ago, 14th July 1875, 24-year-old Stevenson passed the entrance examinations of the Faculty of Advocates; two days later, “a wretchedly cold day”, he was admitted to the office of advocate.

His biographer Claire Harman, defending the TLS, described him as a lawyer “only in a technical sense” (Letters, 25th June 2004). She invoked the consideration that he entered the profession only to please his parents.

Well, if none of us who became lawyers just to please our parents are lawyers in substantialibus, then who shall scape whipping?

Stevenson’s intention to go the bar was no sudden decision. From 9th May 1872, he was conventionally enough of a lawyer to commence his bar apprenticeship with Skene Edwards & Garson, W.S., in Hill Street, Edinburgh. (The firm’s name is rendered variously; as Skene Edwards it merged with Morton Fraser in 2008; Morton Fraser Macroberts is now the heir to its practice.)

He passed the Faculty’s preliminary examinations that November, only for Gladstone’s Lord Advocate George Young (later Lord Young) to advise him to head for the English bar. In October 1873 he travelled to London for the necessary exams, but was prevented from sitting them by illness, which in effect turned his steps back to the Scots bar.

He read law at Edinburgh University in 1873-74. A project of joining the ranks of the many intending advocates who attended German universities in the 19th century, by studying law at Gottingen in the summer of 1872, failed to bear fruit (cf. Alan Rodger, ‘Scottish advocates in the nineteenth century: the German connection’, (1994) 110 Law Quarterly Review 563).

For that year the accounts of the Treasurer of the Faculty record payment of his entry money of £209/9, three years before his admission; over £20,000 in our terms.

A year after Stevenson’s calling, Walter Simpson was his paddling companion in An Inland Voyage; Simpson was a fellow advocate and subsequently a sheriff. For an apprentice and then a pupil at Parliament House supposed to have been aiming for the bar only technically, it is notable that Walter’s cousin Sir Robert Simpson recalled Stevenson’s talk of his prospects as an advocate as “exceptionally interesting”.

Admittedly Stevenson did not regard himself as a born lawyer – because he tells us he only ever encountered one such man. We can date to Sunday 27th June 1875, a fortnight before his admission to the bar, the walk that he took from Swanston to Glencorse, which in that evening he described in a letter to his beloved Frances Sitwell:

The cold, wet midsummer of 1875 did not dampen the tremendous joy and excitement Stevenson’s cousin Etta recorded as his reaction to passing the Faculty’s exams. His emotions do not seem wholly attributable to the promised reward of £1,000 which his father then bestowed upon him, though admittedly it was £100,000 at today’s prices.

He needed £10 for the Faculty’s examination fee, and £6/6 as Library dues; payments which again are still be found in the Treasurer’s accounts.

Justified pride may be reflected in his urgent letter of 15th July 1875 to the person then uppermost in his thoughts, Fanny Sitwell:

After that, according to Harman, “The main benefit of his months at Parliament House … was the five- or six-mile walk he performed on the daily promenade of the precincts”.

If so, the promenade may have been lonely, given counsel’s habit of eschewing the windy precincts to rather walk within the warmth of Parliament Hall.

There Etta remembered him pacing conventionally, and Sheriff Charles Maconochie wrote of walking and talking with him often; or as R.L.S. expressed it to his solicitor Charles Baxter:

Technically indeed his practice may not have had substance, but many an advocate even today remembers the first morning when he opened the lid of his box, to find that an actual, live letter of instruction sufficed to make him feel very much like a real lawyer.

For Stevenson, that was on 25th July when nine days after calling he received his first instructions.

Charles Guthrie, later Lord Guthrie, was another of the eight intrants to the Faculty in 1875, and successor to the Stevensons as the tenant of Swanston Cottage. He reminisced about Stevenson in that summer of ’75:

On idle days, like other idle advocates, Stevenson tells he found it “a great pleasure to sit and hear cases argued or advised”.

Recollections vary about the extent of his practice; he had a clerk, and his cousin Graham Balfour records his having as many as four briefs: “One piece of business might, he told me, have assumed real importance, but a compromise brought it to an end”.

Andrew Murray, later Lord Dunedin, had been admitted to the Faculty a year earlier; he and Stevenson had a mutual friend in Walter Simpson. Murray recalled Stevenson’s days ‘walking the boards of the Parliament House’, as did his fellow Senator Lord Dundas. Dunedin admitted it was only in after years that “we began to see that we had been friends with a genius”. Out of hours, RLS also trod other boards; amateur-dramatic ones with the Dean of Faculty, John Macdonald (later Lord Justice-Clerk Kingsburgh).

The roll of Senators who knew him continues with Thomas Shaw, Lord Shaw of Dunfermline, another of the 1875 calling. Stevenson was in his sixth year as a member of Faculty when Shaw, William Mackintosh (later Lord Kyllachy) and Charles Guthrie were of the select minority who voted for its gift of the Chair of Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University to be conferred on him. Luckily for the world of letters, they lost.

We shall pick up this tale again tomorrow.

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). The second and final part of his article will be published in Scottish Legal News tomorrow.