Titanic: Ship of Lost Illusions

When it set sail on its ill-fated maidenvoyage, RMS Titanic was a marvel of moderntechnology and the latest in luxury, providing agilded setting and false sense of security for itspassengers to act out their imagined ideal livesin a reflection of pre-First World War society.When disaster struck in the form of an icebergfour days into its maiden voyage, that societywas frozen in a moment of time, revealing class,gender and racial discrimination that pervadedcontemporary social attitudes. Kevin Brown takes a fresh approach inexploring the social attitudes to class, manliness,heroism and cowardice, social redemption,the proper role of women and the social,religious and racial prejudices revealed by thesinking. He re-evaluates the code of womenand children first, revealing how attitudesglorifying manliness influenced the behaviourof passengers and crew during the sinking, aswell as suggesting a narrative of chivalry andself-sacrifice to create heroes from the victimsand brand the surviving men as cowards; aninterpretation that is challenged here. Eyewitness accounts evoke the horror of thenight and reveal the underlying ideas of the day.They also show that women played a less passiverole than expected of them. The responses to thesinking by politicians across the spectrum, thelabour movement and suffragettes, suffragistsand anti-suffragists is explored to show morecritical contemporary responses to the disasterthat challenge the heroic narrative. It was aworld that was never so confident in modernityafter the disaster but yet still held on to illusionsof chivalry.