Writing in his elegant signature prose and using previously unpublished sources, deck plans, journal entries, and surviving artifacts, Gareth Russell peers through the portholes of these first-class travelers to immerse us in a time of unprecedented change in British and American history. Today, we can see their stories and the Titanic’s voyage as the beginning of the end of the established hierarchy of the Edwardian era. Within a week of setting sail, they were all caught up in the horrifying disaster of the Titanic’s sinking, one of the biggest news stories of the century. In April 1912, six notable people were among those privileged to experience the height of luxury-first class passage on “the ship of dreams,” the RMS Titanic: Lucy Leslie, Countess of Rothes son of the British Empire, Tommy Andrews American captain of industry John Thayer and his son Jack Jewish-American immigrant Ida Straus and American model and movie star Dorothy Gibson. In this original and meticulously researched narrative history, the author of the “stunning” ( The Sunday Times) Young and Damned and Fair uses the sinking of the Titanic as a prism through which to examine the end of the Edwardian era and the seismic shift modernity brought to the Anglo-American world.
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