While teaching at Greenock Academy, Stephens wrote some minor verse and two short novels ('Rutson Morley' and 'Virtue Le Moyne') which were published in Sharpe's London Magazine in 1861–63.

Representations were then made to the premier, Sir Thomas McIlwraith, that a man of Stephens's ability was being wasted in a small school, and in 1883 a position was found for him as a correspondence clerk in the colonial secretary's department.

Before coming to Australia Stephens had done a little writing for popular magazines, and in 1871 his first volume of poems, Convict Once, was published by Macmillan and Company, which immediately proclaimed him to be an Australian poet of importance.

After Stephens entered the colonial secretary's department in 1883 he was unable (or did not have the financial pressure)[2] to do much literary work though he wrote occasionally for the press.

No doubt Stephens's official papers exercised his literary talent, but from a creative standpoint his employment in the civil service was perhaps not the best use of his time, and he wrote little verse in later years.

The Godolphin Arabian in the metre and style of Byron's Beppo goes on its pleasant rhyming way for about three thousand lines and is still readable, but as it is not included in any collected edition, it has been almost wholly forgotten.

At least eighteen of his published poems have unmistakably Australian themes and settings: "Fulfilment", "Cape Byron", "A Coin of Trajan in Australia", "A Lost Chance", "Adelaide Ironside", "Australian Anthem", "Opening Hymn", "Drought and Doctrine", "Marsupial Bill", "A Piccaninny", "To a Black Gin", "New Chum and Old Monarch", "The Great Pig Story of the Tweed", "A Son of the Soil", "Big Ben", "The Southern Cross", "A Brisbane Reverie" and "Convict Once".

In September 1878, Stephens became a founding member and an early president of the famed literary Johnsonian Club, Brisbane; 'an institution being the association of pressmen, artists, actors, and scientists'.