James Walter Ferrier - RLS Website

"Ferrier was consumed and wrecked by a miserable craving for drink. Will he, I have still to ask myself as I write these words, will he outlive the tendency, and become a conscientious, and kind gentleman as we knew him in his sober hours? Or will he go downward to the sot, the spunge and the buffoon? When last I parted from him, five months ago, he and I, for the first time in our intimacy, shed tears together over this alternative; he promised me, for my sake as well as for his own, to continue the good fight; and yet ever since I feared to write him"

(RLS in a "fragmentary autobiography" written c. 1880, from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol iii [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 64)

James Walter Ferrier (1850-1883) was one of RLS’s friends from his days at Edinburgh University. Ferrier (along with RLS) was one of the co-editors of the College Magazine at the university. Although the magazine was a failure, RLS enjoyed working on it. He wrote about his memories of editing with Ferrier in “A College Magazine” in Memories and Portraits (1887).

Ferrier, Charles Baxter, Walter Simpson and Bob Stevenson made up RLS’s circle of friends in the 1870s – the young men would frequent the bars and brothels together in Edinburgh.

Tragically, Ferrier died of alcoholism as a young man. Stevenson was deeply grieved to lose someone who he felt such affection for. He wrote a tribute to Ferrier in the essay “Old Mortality” (1884): “Well, now he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore thrown down before the great deliverer” (“Old Mortality”, in Memories and Portraits, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Swanston edn, vol ix [London: Chatto and Windus, 1911], p. 34).