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Titanic: A Night Remembered

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In "Titanic: A Night Remembered" Stephanie Barczewski has the courage to take the Titanic story where very few contemporary authors have dared to take it, outside of the superficial "conventional wisdom" inspired by James Cameron's 1997 film "Titanic." It's a remarkable effort and well worth reading.

As the title suggests, the book is about how the Titanic and the Titanic disaster were remembered (and are remembered), particularly in three cities which have a particularly close identification with the Titanic. They are Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the ship was built; Southampton, England, from where the ship set sail on her only voyage--and the city which four-fifths of the Titanic's crew called home; and Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, where almost seven hundred Irish immigrants boarded her. Dr. Barczewski takes pains to contrast the memories of those three towns with how the disaster was perceived in the United States, particularly in regard to the relationships that existed between the social classes. She understands as few Americans do that social class was the great defining force of British society in 1912. She comprehends as few Americans do today--and few did in 1912--that the moral pressures of an individual's social class could and did exert powerful, even dominant, influences on people's behavior in 1912, particularly Europeans.

This is a key point, not only to her narrative, but also to the "voice" she adopts in her writing. She writes (whether consciously or not) from a fairly consistent British point of view, which leads her to make some rather barbed comments and observations about the Americans of the time. If these remarks are unflattering, they are also valid, at least from the perspective of being ideas held by much of the rest of the world about Americans in the years before the Great War. She is under no obligation to burnish the image of the United States or the American people (or most particularly the American press) as it existed in 1912: her "editorializing," as one reviewer calls it, is nothing more than a recapitulation of attitudes that existed at the time of the disaster, and the echoes of which I can affirm from personal experience still exist today. I know Belfast and Southampton very well, and I can state with complete assurance that the Titanic disaster is still felt in those two cities in ways that no city in the United States can appreciate, comprehend, or empathize with. (An inexact but apt parallel would be to point out that no one who does not live in New York can ever truly understand the impact that 9/11 had on that city's collective psyche, and anyone who would claim to do so is a liar.)

Just as important, the social standards of 1912, not current social values, are the yardstick Dr. Barczewski uses for what was and was not acceptable behavior aboard the Titanic as the ship was sinking, as well as afterward. If she uses the word "coward" with what some overly-sensitive souls feel is unnecessary frequency, she is merely reflecting the prevailing social standards of the day, not imposing her own arbitrary judgment.

And there lies the essential core of Stephanie Barczewski's work. She is recounting a collective memory, still echoing almost a hundred years after the Titanic disaster, from the distinct perspective of where those memories were and are focused. To her everlasting credit, she devotes more time to the men and women who built the Titanic and who crewed her--who essentially brought the Titanic to life--than to those who merely inhabited her for a few days. Those are memories which deserve to be memorialized, and Dr. Barczewski has done exactly that. Brava!

The topic of the book, as the title suggests, is not what happened during the Titanic disaster but how the incident and the people involved were remembered. Specifically, Barczewski contrasts the American reactions to and interpretations of the event, epitomised by Cameron's film, to British responses, beginning with the two inquiries that were held, one by the United States Senate, the other by the British Board of Trade. In doing so, she provides brief biographies of several of the most important figures in on the Titanic--Captain Edward Smith, First Officer Murdoch, wireless operator Jack Phillips, shipbuilder Thomas Andrews, and bandleader Wallace Hartley--and chapters on the three cities most closely associated with the ship: Belfast in Northern Ireland, where it was built; Southampton, whence it sailed; and Queenstown (or Cove) in southern Ireland, its last port of call before striking the open sea.

Barczewski demonstrates how American interpretations tended to see the Titanic disaster as an upset of the existing class, gender, and nationalist structures of British society, upheld on a British-run ship as on land, culminating in Cameron's film interpretation of Titanic as not a British ship at all but an Irish one, built by Irish workers. British interpretations, by contrast, used the sinking to reinforce those structures; the press, public monuments, and poetry portrayed manly Anglo-Saxon men sacrificing themselves in purity of heart for their weaker dependants, women and servants and foreigners. The reason for this, she suggests, was that the sinking of Britain's largest, most luxurious vessel was a direct hit to its waning mastery over the seas. No longer could Britain boast that she ruled the waves when American and German shipping lines were building larger, faster, more elaborately appointed ships every day. After Titanic, it would all be downhill, though her sister ship the Olympic served with distinguished reliability into the Second World War.

It was a pleasure to read a book on this subject that disposed of the actual events of April 14, 1912 in one chapter without too many speculations and then delved into the wider implications of the disaster. My only complaint is that the book ended without any sort of summary of her argument; it went directly from the chapter on Queenstown into the appendices. Clear and persuasive though her argument was, I felt that the book needed a summary, structurally. Nevertheless, I recommend it to anyone interested in the world's most famous maritime disaster.

Her tone is brash and her words are served on acid-laced sandpaper. As an editorial that relies heavily on editorials for material, it is a good and provocative read. However, her constant American-bashing gets very old very quickly especially in this day and age when I hear how much the world hates us on a regular basis on the news. I can appreciate where she is coming from but question why. If she is trying to provoke debate, she does it well in a one-sided and opinionated manner. I question why she constantly puts down the country that employs her and why she seems to delight in calling American millionaires "plutocrats" even if they are not. I was hoping to see a thought-provoking debate on what happened (editorially and culturally speaking) on both sides of the Atlantic, both pros and cons. Instead, she sticks to a very narrow British point of view.

While I would be willing to praise her taking the side of the disaster not often heard in America, I find it increasingly hard to give her any merit or credibility when she cannot get the simplest of facts straight. For instance, the ship's carpenter's name is John not Jim and it is well known by now that the photo she labels as being of John Jacob Astor is, in fact, not. Obvious errors aside, I find it a demerit in her favor that she relies heavily on Butler's Unsinkable.

While the book is an interesting and infuriating rant, it does not rise above editorializing what has become, whether the author likes it or not, a pop culture icon. As a historian, this book will reside in my collection. It is about Titanic and therefore automatically gets a place in my library. However, it will henceforth be taken out only to be used as a hard surface on which to place my notepaper or coffee whilst researching more credible sources.

If you're browsing through the bookstore shelves looking for material on the Titanic, you might see this book and mistakenly take it for Walter Lord's similarly-titled 'A Night to Remember.' Make sure to get the right book, because Lord's novel is in every way superior, and, just as importantly, doesn't take such a high-handed, condescending and know-it-all view of everything that occurred on the night of Titanic's sinking.

This book is so bad it doesn't merit an in-depth review, so let me just forewarn you that the author makes several sexist remarks, many of which are aimed at males and their failure to behave in a Victorian gentlemanly manner -- ironic considering the author's faux-feminist, supposedly progressive view. She seems to believe that she knows exactly what went on in different people's minds, without any substancial, reliable (read: not tabloid) sources to back her claims. She freely throws the word coward around.

The whole work screams of a lack of professionalism, and shouldn't be considered a credible academic source. It's not even good gossip, because you heard it all before, just like you probably heard this book's title before (Lord's book) before she ripped it off and tried to pass it off as something original.

If you're looking for a serious, thorough examination of events unfolding on the night of the titanic's sinking, please look elsewhere, unless you want to annoy yourself.