The Ship of Dreams

“The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era”, by Gareth Russell, 2020, focuses on the story of the Titanic through the lives, experiences, and testimony of a variety of passengers. This book is my choice for the category Travel for the 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. This book was previously published in Britain as "The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World."

Russell writes in his Author’s Note at the beginning of the book:

“In the strictest sense, The Ship of Dreams is not solely an account of the Titanic disaster, nor a striving to replace the works of earlier scholars who examined the catastrophe as a whole. As its subtitle suggests, it is an attempt to look at her sinking as a fin de siècle, with a deliberate exploration of the voyage as a microcosm of the unsettled world of the Edwardian upper classes. … The focus of this narrative is six first-class passengers and their families: a British aristocrat, a patriotic maritime architect, an American plutocrat and his son, a first-generation American philanthropist, and one of the first movie stars. By examining its story through the experiences of these six first-class passengers, it is not only possible to explore the ways in which the upper classes were changing by 1912 but also to reflect on how the isolation created by privilege left many of them unaware or indifferent to the coming danger, until it was too late.”

Russell has meticulously researched his material, and there are approximately 100 pages of notes, references and index. But this reads like a novel – an adventure, a love story, a mystery, a tragedy. He even creates tension, even though we know how the story is going to end.

What I found particularly interesting is a number of myths that he dispels that have appeared in many films about the sinking of the Titanic. These include that the third-class passengers were locked below deck, that a man or men dressed as women to get on a lifeboat, and the character of J. Bruce Ismay, Managing Director of the White Star Line, as “both vulpine villain and a serial weakling in the hysterical aftermath of the sinking.” Russell definitively proves that none of these are true.

The most surprising myth for me was about the lifeboats. Many accounts of the sinking claim that the reason there were so many victims was because there were not enough lifeboats on board for all passengers. In fact, the Titanic’s number of lifeboats fit the legal requirement of the time and was the same number as contemporary cruise ships. But even if there had been enough lifeboats for all passengers, it would have been impossible for all of them to board the lifeboats in the short time it took the ship to sink. Interestingly, many passengers – from all classes – did not want to board lifeboats, and subsequently waited too long. At first, they didn’t understand how serious the iceberg’s damage was and thought that rescue from another ship was coming soon. So they felt safer staying on board rather than being lowered in a small boat into a turbulent ice-cold ocean. Many of the third-class passengers were immigrants traveling with their families and the possessions they could bring along. They didn’t want to abandon their possessions or take a chance that their children would be unsafe on the ocean. By the time remaining passengers realized that it was necessary to leave the ship, it was too late. In hindsight we realize how unfortunate their choices were.

I enjoyed reading this book very much, but I don’t think that the book convincingly connects the sinking of the Titanic to the “end of the Edwardian era.” The book’s references to the first-class survivors indicates that they returned to the lives and activities they had before the tragedy. Russell writes, “…the European Seasons of 1914 acquired a reputation for unparalleled majesty that may perhaps have been endowed with hindsight by the fact that they were the last of the line.” So it seems more accurate to see WWI as the end of the Edwardian era.

But, despite that, the book was a fascinating read.