My son, then ten years old, was playing, if you please, with Louis […]. And little Austin burst into my room and said, “Louis says come and play.” But oh, I’ll regret it to my dying day, I said, “Oh, later when I’ve finished my letter I’ll come.” And I didn’t go.
—RLS’s stepdaughter Belle Strong, speaking in 1949, recalls the day Stevenson died
“Requiem”, above – Robert Louis Stevenson’s self-composed epitaph – provides the title for Philip Larkin’s most famous #poem, “This Be the Verse”. Daniel Bosch compares the two epitaphic fictions in the Paris Review
Dr Craig Lamont looks at how Robert Louis Stevenson & his literary creations have been – & continue to be – remembered & memorialised, in Scotland & around the world