Book description
Marking the centenary of the Titanic disaster, 'Titanic Lives' is an
utterly compelling exploration of the lives of the passengers and crew
on board the most famous ship in history.
The RMS Titanic was built as one of the world's largest and most
luxurious liners. A marine Ritz, it was a 45,000-tonne hotel of thin
steel plates, travelling at a speed of 21 knots across the North Atlantic.
On the night of 14 April 1912, midway through her maiden voyage, the
seemingly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg, sustaining a 300-feet gash as
six compartments were wrenched open to the sea. In little over two
hours, the palatial Titanic nose-dived to the bottom of the ocean. Over
1,500 people perished in the freezing waters.
Who were the people who by a cruel twist of fate happened to be
travelling on the ship? In this original and timely book, Richard
Davenport-Hines views the great liner as a paradigm of Edwardian
society. At the bottom of the ship was the steerage class, filled with
emigrants hoping for a better life in the New World. Above them were
hundreds of second-class passengers buoyed up by their prosperous
respectability. On the upper decks were the hereditary rich and those of
inconceivable wealth - Americans like John Jacob Astor IV, who was found
with £2000 and 00 in sodden notes in his pockets.
Bringing together over 2,000 passengers and crew from every class and
every continent, 'Titanic Lives' tells their stories, re-creating the
complexities, disparities and tensions of life one hundred years ago.
'A masterpiece of narrative history' Mail on Sunday
'An astonishing work, of meticulous research, which allows us to know,
in painful detail, the men and women on that fateful voyage. Even now, a
hundred years later, Mr Davenport-Hines finds a new, and heart-breaking,
story to tell' Julian Fellowes
'Eloquent and absorbing… As well as being a fascinating work of social
history, Titanic Lives is a remarkable study of empathy and its absence.
As such it will stay afloat long after the armada of other Titanic books
have gone down' Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph
'Richard Davenport-Hines's immaculately researched history brings an
extraordinary cavalcade of characters to vivid life' Sunday Telegraph
'Fascinating social history' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
'By far the most gripping book on the subject…he manages to maintain an
extraordinary forward momentum, yet at the same time rescue from the
deep, the biographies of hundreds of people…Davenport-Hines's sense of
what to reveal when is perfectly tuned' Rose Tremain, Guardian Richard
Davenport-Hines won the Wolfson Prize for History for his first book,
'Dudley Docker'. He is an adviser to the 'Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography' and has also written biographies of W. H.Auden and Marcel
Proust. His most recent book, 'Ettie, the Intimate Life of Lady
Desborough' was published in 2008. A Fellow of the Royal Historical
Society and the Royal Society of Literature, he reviews for the Sunday
Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement.
