John Hall-Stevenson John Hall-Stevenson John Hall-Stevenson (1718–1785), 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". 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
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman the Books", and the Scriblerian collaborative work, "The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus". The shade of Cervantes is present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to Rocinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote in many ways) and Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humour", along with the genre-defying structure of "Tristram Shandy", which owes much to the second part of Cervantes' novel, all demonstrate the influence of Cervantes. The novel also makes use of John Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas"