Key Figures Aboard RMS Titanic: Superstars & Scapegoats

By Anthony Nicholas

Titanic. The Marilyn Monroe of ocean liners. A sleek, sultry beauty, taken out way before her time. A kind of 21st century Flying Dutchman, with interiors by Cesar Ritz, still striving to achieve the waters of a port she can never reach. Fuelled by a subtle mixture of horror, fascination and sheer, fatal glamour, she surges heedlessly across the still, starlit calm of our collective subconscious, hell bent on achieving her chilling, near midnight rendezvous with her killer. Titanic is a brilliantly lit stage, carrying her cast of exotic, terminally endangered extras toward an abyss at once both unfathomable and inconceivable. Here’s where any similarity with any other tome about the Titanic ends. For the first time ever, a succession of key characters and groups of individuals come to the fore. Centre stage, over seventeen chapters, we meet the men whose decisions, actions and omissions combined like some slow burning powder trail to trigger a final, cataclysmic conclusion; the foundering, in mid Atlantic, of the biggest moving object ever seen on the face of the planet. One by one, a series of individuals take a bow. Seemingly omnipotent owners and hugely experienced ship’s officers. Engineers and designers. Would be rescuers and embattled wireless operators. We meet them as individuals, not supermen. Their histories, backgrounds and life experiences are assessed for the first time ever, putting their actions on the night that Titanic sank into a context, a light as stark as that of the distress rockets, arcing into the sky…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399086035

Reviews for Key Figures Aboard RMS Titanic

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Travel writer and great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, Lucinda Hawksley has written about her illustrious ancestor, including Dickens and Christmas. Her newest book explores Dickens as a travel writer. “Almost everywhere I have travelled,” she shares, “I have discovered a connection with my great-great-great grandfather.”It’s been perhaps forty years since I read a biography on Dicken, and I had no recollection of his extensive travels across Europe. I was aware of his visits to America. I will admit, I have not read ALL of Dickens’ books, although a complete set has been on my shelf for almost fifty years. I was surprised to learn how many of his books reflect his experience abroad.When depression hit him, his wanderlust inspired him to go abroad, not only on tours but to take up residence for a lengthy time in Italy and Paris. Hawksley draws from Dickens’ letters, articles, and books to provide quotes about his experiences. I loved reading them, enjoying Dickens’ humor and vivid descriptions.Dickens traveling began in England when he was a journalist seeking to cover stories, “adrenaline-fueled travels,” Hawskely calls them. “Belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from Long, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys,” Dickens wrote, arriving in time to turn in his story to the printers. The roads were muddy and rough, the countryside held robbers. His experiences informs The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.What a prodigious walker Dickens was! Day-long walks in all kinds of weather. Consider Dickens’ description of one day in Scotland: “To-day we have had a journey of between 50 and 60 miles, though the bleakest and most desolate part of Scotland, where the hill-tops are still covered with great patches of snow, and the road winds over steep mountain-passes, and on the brink of deep brooks and precipices.” Another day it took four hours to walk sixteen miles in a gale, his wife Catherine’s timely removal from the carriage coming before it was caught up in a flood.Everywhere he went, Dickens toured the prisons and noted the conditions of the poorest neighborhoods. He was particularly appalled by slavery. Southerners persisted in asking him his feelings about their ‘domestic institution,’ and he told them what he thought. He didn’t finish his American tour, turning back North.“Party feeling runs high,” he wrote about 1842 America, “the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins…” (Some things never change!)One American custom that disgusted him was spitting. He describes floors slick with it, “the stone floor looks as if it were paved with open oysters.”Dickens met many American writers, including a young Edgar Allan Poe, who was inspired by Dicken’s pet raven Grip when he wrote his famous poem The Raven. Grip ended up in the Philadelphia Free Library! In Washington D. C. he dined with John Quincy Adams, noting that “Adams is a fine old fellow-seventy-six years old, but with most surprising vigor, memory, readiness, and pluck.” He felt sympathy for the Native Americans, reduced to assimilation for survival, and he was appalled by the destruction of the country’s primal forests.Dickens wrote, “Canada has held, and always will retain, a foremost place in my remembrance.”Lengthy quotations from Dickens on Italy describes its beauty and the discomfort: “…but in the day you must keep the lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad; and when the sun goes down you must shut up all the windows or the mosquitoes would tempt you to commit suicide.” He also noted “the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose name is Legion, and who populate the coach-house to the extent that I daily expect to see the carriage going off bodily, drawn by myriads of industrious fleas in harness.”He especially loved Paris, France, “the most extraordinary place in the world.” He met Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and George Sand. He reveled in his fame, while Catherine became more unhappy. They had been happy for many years, but after many children, and becoming stout, she was losing him. Dickens fell in love with actress Ellen Ternan, who was his daughter’s age. Catherine moved out, and Dickens set Ellen up in an apartment with her mother.He made a second trip to America to raise money, but his health was poor during this time, with a cough and a swollen foot, unable to sleep or eat, dependent on laudanum. His hoped for trip to Australia and New Zealand never happened; Dickens died at age 58.I so enjoyed this book and I have to wonder why I never read his travel books. It is something to look forward to.I received a free egalley from Pen & Sword History through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.