ABSTRACT
On 17 December 1894, the London press announced the death two weeks earlier in Samoa of Robert Louis Stevenson. The Times ran a two-and-a-half-column obituary, 'Death of Mr. R.L. Stevenson', the first article following official reports, advertisements and 'intelligences' about government, politics, empire and economics. Having painted a picture of the intertwined histories of the words of Robert Louis Stevenson and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, it is appropriate to close with a passage from Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston, the novel left incomplete at the author's death. This chapter argues that there is a relation between the Vaughan Williams songs and the vicissitudes of Stevenson's posthumous reputation. It provides a question about authorial intentions with respect to the posthumously published cycle of nine songs. But Vaughan Williams did read the book after publication, and he wrote to Foss on 7 February 1951.
