William Stevenson (Scottish writer)

William Stevenson (1772–1829) was a Scottish nonconformist preacher, tutor and official, now known as a writer and father of Elizabeth Gaskell.

Stevenson was the son of a captain in the Royal Navy, born at Berwick-upon-Tweed on 26 November 1772. He was educated at the grammar school there under Joseph Romney. In 1787 he entered Daventry Academy as a student for the nonconformist ministry, and in 1789 the academy moved to Northampton, where John Horsey was principal.

After he had spent a short time at Bruges as tutor to an English family, the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792 compelled Stevenson to return to England, where he obtained the post of classical tutor at Manchester Academy. While at Manchester he became an Arian under the influence of Thomas Barnes. For a short time he preached at Dob Lane Chapel, Failsworth, where he was the successor of Lewis Loyd the banker.

Stevenson resigned his posts and went as a pupil to a farmer in East Lothian. In 1797 he took a farm at Saughton, near Edinburgh. There he had James Cleghorn, a friend, as partner, but was less successful. After four or five years he gave up farming, and set up a boarding-house for students in Drummond Street, Edinburgh. In 1806 James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale invited Stevenson to accompany him to India as private secretary; Lauderdale's bid to become governor-general there then fell through, but he obtained for Stevenson the post of keeper of the records to the Treasury.

Stevenson lived in the neighbourhood of London. Uglow identifies him, in the early 1820s, in the sketch from Recollections of Literary Characters of Katherine Thomson devoted to John Galt, as a taciturn man of letters who was a good listener. He died at his house at Chelsea, on 20 March 1829.

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