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.
[1] On his return to England at the age of twenty, Hall married Anne, the daughter of Ambrose Stevenson of the Manor House, Durham, and added his wife's surname to his own.
He wrote verse in imitation of La Fontaine and collected kindred spirits which whom he formed a "club of demoniacks" which met at Skelton several times a year.
He published a Lyric Epistle (1760) to his friend Sterne on the triumph of Tristram Shandy,[4] which Gray called "absolute nonsense".
Hall-Stevenson's A Sentimental Dialogue between two Souls in the palpable Bodies of an English Lady of Quality and an Irish Gentleman (1768) was seen as a parody of his friend Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
He denounced the Earl of Bute and all politicians, whether Whig or Tory, with such works as A Pastoral Cordial; or an Anodyne Sermon, preached before their Graces Newcastle and Devonshire (1763), A Pastoral Puke; a second Sermon preached before the people called Whigs; by an Independent (1764), Makarony Fables, with the new Fable of the Bees (1767), Lyric Consolations, with the Speech of Alderman Wilkes delivered in a Dream (1768) and An Essay upon the King's Friends (1776).
On 17 February 1785, he wrote to his grandson that he had suffered from marrying too early and that shortage of funds had forced him to live in the country.