Chapter 43: 42 - Titanic in popular culture ( part lll )
There have so far been eight English-language drama films (not counting TV films) about the Titanic disaster: four American, two British and two German, produced between 1912 and 1997.
1912–43 :-
Poster for Saved from the Titanic (1912), the first drama film about the disaster
The first drama film about the disaster, Saved from the Titanic, was released only 29 days after the disaster. Its star and co-writer, Dorothy Gibson, had actually been on the ship and was aboard Titanic's No. 7 lifeboat, the first to leave the ship. The film presents a heavily fictionalised version of Gibson's experiences, told in flashback, intercut with newsreel footage of Titanic and a mockup of the collision itself. Released in the United States on 14 May 1912 and subsequently shown internationally, it was a major success. However, it is now considered a lost film, as the only known prints were destroyed in a fire in March 1914.
Gibson's film competed against the German film In Nacht und Eis (In Night and Ice), directed by the Romanian Mime Misu, who played the Titanic's Captain Smith. It was largely shot aboard the liner SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. The fatal collision was depicted by ramming a 20-foot (6.1 m) model of Titanic into a block of floating ice. The impact knocks the passengers off their feet and causes pandemonium on board. The film does not depict the evacuation of the ship but shows the captain panicking while water rises around the feet of wireless operator Jack Phillips as he sends SOS messages. The ship's band is repeatedly shown playing musical pieces, the titles of which are shown on captions; it appears that a live band would play the corresponding music to the cinema audience. As the film ends, the waves close over the swimming captain.
Although not strictly about Titanic, a number of other drama films were produced around this time that may have been inspired by the disaster. In October 1912 the Danish film company Nordisk released Et Drama på Havet (A Drama at Sea) in which a ship at sea catches fire and sinks, while passengers fight to board lifeboats. It was released in the United States as The Great Ocean Disaster or Peril of Fire. The same company produced a follow-up film in December 1913, which was also released in the US. Titled Atlantis, it was based on a novel of the same name by Gerhart Hauptmann and culminated with a depiction of a sinking liner. It was the longest and most ambitious Danish film to date, taking up eight reels and costing a then-huge sum of $60,000. It was filmed aboard a real liner, the SS C.F. Tietgen, chartered especially for the filming with 500 people aboard. The sinking scene was filmed in the North Sea. The Tietgen sank for real five years later when she was torpedoed by a German U-boat. A British film company planned to go one better by building and sinking a replica liner, and in 1914 the real-life scuppering of a large vessel took place for the Vitagraph picture Lost in Mid-Ocean.
The 1929 British sound film Atlantic was clearly (though loosely) based on the story of the Titanic. Derived from Ernest Raymond's play The Berg, it focuses on the sinking of a liner carrying a priest and an atheist author, both of whom must come to terms with their imminent deaths. Exterior scenes were shot on a ship moored on the River Thames but most of the film is set in an interior lounge, in a very static and talkative fashion. The ship's evacuation is depicted as taking place amid pandemonium but the actual sinking is not shown; although the director did shoot sinking scenes, it was decided that they should not be used.
The Hollywood producer David O. Selznick tried to persuade Alfred Hitchcock to make a Titanic film for him in 1938, based on a novel of the same name by Wilson Mizner and Carl Harbaugh. The storyline involves a gangster who renounces his life of crime when he falls in love with a woman aboard Titanic. Selznick envisaged buying the redundant liner Leviathan to use as a set. Hitchcock disliked the idea and openly mocked it; he suggested that a good way to shoot it would be to "begin with a close-up of a rivet while the credits rolled, then to pan slowly back until after two hours the whole ship would fill the screen and The End would appear." When asked about the project by a reporter he said, "Oh yes, I've had experience with icebergs. Don't forget I directed Madeleine Carroll" (who, as Hitchcock was probably aware, had starred in the Titanic-inspired Atlantic). To add to the problems, Howard Hughes and a French company threatened lawsuits as they had their own Titanic scripts, and British censors let it be known that they disapproved of a film that might be seen as critical of the British shipping industry. The project was eventually abandoned as the Second World War loomed and Hitchcock instead made Rebecca for Selznick in 1940, winning an Oscar for Best Picture . A similar plotline of a thief renouncing his life of crime after falling in love with a steerage woman aboard the ship was later used in the 1996 television miniseries Titanic.
The Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels personally commissioned Titanic, a 1943 propaganda film made during World War II. It was largely shot in Berlin with some scenes filmed aboard the SS Cap Arcona. It focuses on a fictitious conflict between "Sir" Bruce Ismay and John Jacob Astor, reimagined as an English Lord, for control of the White Star Line. An equally fictitious young German First Officer, Petersen, warns against Ismay's reckless pursuit of the Blue Riband, calling Titanic a ship "run not by sailors, but by stock speculators". His warnings fall on deaf ears and the ship hits an iceberg. Several aspects of the plot are reflected in James Cameron's 1997 Titanic: a girl rejects her parents' wishes to pursue the man she loves, there is a wild dancing scene in steerage and a man imprisoned in the ship's flooding prison is freed with the help of an emergency ax. Herbert Selpin, the film's director, was removed from the project after making unflattering remarks about the German war effort. He was personally questioned by Goebbels and 24 hours later he was found hanged in his cell. The film itself was withdrawn from circulation shortly after release on the grounds that a film portraying chaos and mass death was injurious to war morale, though it has also been suggested that its theme of a morally upright hero standing up to a reckless leader steering the vessel to disaster was too politically sensitive for the Nazis to tolerate. It was also too sensitive for the British, who prevented it from being shown in the western zones of occupied Germany until the 1960s. East Germans had no such difficulty as the film accorded well with the anti-capitalist sentiments of their communist rulers.
1953–2012 :-
Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb starred as an estranged couple in the 1953 film Titanic. The film makes little effort to be historically accurate and focuses on the human drama as the couple, Mr and Mrs Sturges, feud over the custody of their children while their daughter has a shipboard romance with a student travelling on the ship. As Titanic sinks the couple are reconciled, the women are rescued and Sturges and his son go down with the ship. The film earned an Oscar for its screenplay. The film's lack of regard for historical accuracy can be explained by the fact that it uses the disaster merely as a backdrop for the melodrama. This proved unsatisfactory for some, notably Belfast-born William MacQuitty, who had witnessed the launch of Titanic as a boy and had long wished to make a film that put the nautical events front and centre.
A Night to Remember, starring Kenneth More, was the outcome of MacQuitty's interest in the Titanic story. Released in 1958 and produced by MacQuitty, the film is based on the 1955 book of the same name by Walter Lord. Its budget of £600,000 (equivalent to £13.1 million in 2019) was exceptionally large for a British film and made it the most expensive film ever made in Britain up to that time. The film focuses on the story of the sinking, portraying the major incidents and players in a documentary-style fashion with considerable attention to detail; 30 sets were constructed using the builders' original plans for RMS Titanic. The ship's former Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall and survivor Lawrence Beesley acted as consultants. One day during shooting Beesley infiltrated the set but was discovered by the director, who ordered him off; thus, as Julian Barnes puts it, "for the second time in his life, Beesley left the Titanic just before it was due to go down".
Although it won numerous awards including a Golden Globe Award for Best English-Language Foreign Film and received high praise from reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, it was at best only a modest commercial success because of its original huge budget and a relatively poor impact in America. It has nonetheless aged well; the film has considerable artistic merit and, according to Professor Paul Heyer, it helped to spark the wave of disaster films that included The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Heyer comments that it "still stands as the definitive cinematic telling of the story and the prototype and finest example of the disaster-film genre".
In 1979 EMI Television produced S.O.S. Titanic, a TV movie that tells the story of the disaster as a personal drama. Survivor Lawrence Beesley (played by David Warner) is presented as a romantic hero and Thomas Andrews (played by Geoffrey Whitehead) is also seen as a significant character for the first time. Ian Holm's J. Bruce Ismay is presented as the villain. Warner went on to play Caledon Hockley's manservant, Spicer Lovejoy, in James Cameron's Titanic in 1997. The production was partially filmed aboard a real liner, the RMS Queen Mary.
1980's Raise the Titanic was an expensive flop. Based on the best-selling book of the same name by thriller writer Clive Cussler, the plot involves Cussler's hero Dirk Pitt (Richard Jordan) seeking to salvage an intact Titanic from her location on the sea bed. He aims to gain a decisive American advantage in the Cold War by retrieving a stockpile of a fictitious ultra-rare mineral of military value, "byzanium", that the ship was supposedly carrying on her maiden voyage. The film, directed by Jerry Jameson, cost at least $40 million. It was the most expensive movie made up to that time but made only $10 million at the box office. Lew Grade, the producer, later remarked that it would have been "cheaper to lower the Atlantic".
The Titanic makes a morbid cameo appearance in Ghostbusters II. The negatively charged ectoplasm apparently has reached the sunken remains of the ship and joined it together. Upon its arrival in New York Harbor, its ghostly passengers debark, appearing to shimmer, reflecting their demise in the sea. The ship has a gaping hole (though too far forward on her hull) where the iceberg punched her, and the top near the bridge appears to be split apart. As the Titanic finally appear at its destination over half a century late, the Pier 34 dock staff stare in disbelief while the supervisor quips, "Well, better late than never!"
James Cameron's Titanic is the most commercially successful film about the ship's sinking. Titanic became the highest-grossing film in history nine weeks after opening on 19 December 1997, and a week later became the first film ever to gross $1 billion worldwide. By March 1998 it had made over $1.2 billion, a record that stood until Cameron's next drama film Avatar overtook it in 2009. Cameron's film centres around a love affair between First Class passenger Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Third Class passenger Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). Cameron designed the characters of Rose and Jack to serve as what he has termed "an emotional lightning rod for the audience", making the tragedy of the disaster more immediate. As Peter Kramer puts it, the love story is intended to humanise the disaster, while the disaster lends the love story a mythic aspect. Cameron's film cost $200 million, making it the most expensive film ever made up to that time; much of it was shot on a vast, nearly full-scale replica of Titanic's starboard side built in Baja California, Mexico. The film was converted into 3D and re-released on 4 April 2012 to coincide with the centenary of the sinking. Cameron's film is the only Titanic drama to have been partially filmed aboard the vessel, which the Canadian director visited in two Russian submersibles in the summer of 1995
Television :-
See the list of television movies and episodes for examples of the many references to the Titanic and her disaster.
With the advent of television, the themes and social microcosm provided by the Titanic scenario inspired TV productions, from expansive serial epics to satirical animated spoofs. The list of genres relating to the Titanic grew to include science fiction; and beginning with the first episode of The Time Tunnel in 1966, titled "Rendezvous With Yesterday", the RMS Titanic has become an irresistible destination for time-travelers.
The Titanic was also spoofed in the Pokémon series as the S.S. Cussler in the episode An Undersea Place to Call Home!.. After it sank, it became the home of many oceanic Pokémon, most notably Dragalge who constructed the wreck along with other shipwrecks into a wildlife community.
Radio:-
In April 2019, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Ship of Lies by Ron Hutchinson, a five-part drama based on some of the legends and myths about RMS Titanic.
Books :----------------------
Survivors' accounts and "instant books" :-
The cover of Logan Marshall's The Sinking of the Titanic (1912), which has been criticised for its sensationalism and inaccuracy
The sinking of the Titanic has been the inspiration for a huge number of books since 1912; as Steven Biel puts it, "Rumor has it that the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the [American] Civil War, and the Titanic disaster."
The first wave of books was published shortly after the sinking. Two survivors published their own accounts at the time: Lawrence Beesley's The Loss of the S.S. Titanic, and Archibald Gracie's The Truth about the Titanic. Beesley started writing his book shortly after being rescued by the RMS Carpathia and supplemented it with interviews with fellow-survivors. It was published by Houghton Mifflin within only three weeks of the disaster. Gracie carried out extensive research and interviews, as well as attending the US Senate inquiry into the sinking. He died in December 1912, just before his book was published.
Titanic's former Second Officer, Charles Lightoller, published an account of the sinking in his 1935 book Titanic and Other Ships, which Eugene L. Rasor characterises as an apologia. Stewardess Violet Jessop gave a fairly short first-hand account in her posthumously published Titanic Survivor (1997). Carpathia's 1912 captain, Arthur Rostron, published an account of his own role in his 1931 autobiography Home from the Sea.
Various other authors of the first wave published compilations of news reportage, interviews and survivors' accounts. However, as W. B. Bartlett comments, they were "marked by some journalism of highly suspect and sensationalist variety ... which tell[s] more about the standards of journalistic editorialism at the time than they do about what really happened on the Titanic." The British writer Filson Young's book Titanic, described by Richard Howells as "darkly rhetorical ... [and] heavily laden with cultural pronouncement", was one of the first to be published, barely a month after the disaster. Many of the American books followed an established form that had been used after other disasters such as the Galveston Storm of 1900 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Publishers rushed out "dollar" or "instant books" which were published in great numbers on cheap paper and sold for a dollar by door-to-door salesmen. They followed a fairly similar style, which D. Bruce Anderson describes as "liberal use of short chapters, telegraphic subheadings, and sentimental, breezy prose". They summarised press coverage supplemented by extracts from survivors' accounts and sentimental eulogies of the victims. Logan Marshall's The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters (also published as On Board the Titanic: The Complete Story With Eyewitness Accounts) was a typical example of the genre. Many such "dollar books", such as Marshall Everett's Story of the Wreck of the Titanic, the Ocean's Greatest Disaster: 1912 Memorial Edition, were styled as "memorial" or "official" editions in a bid to grant them a bogus degree of extra authenticity.
A Night to Remember and after :-
The "second wave" of Titanic–related books was launched in 1955 by Walter Lord, a New York advertising executive with a lifelong interest in the story of the Titanic disaster. Writing in his spare time, he interviewed around sixty survivors as well as drawing on previous writings and research. His book A Night to Remember was a huge success, selling 60,000 copies within two months of its publication. It remained listed as a best-seller for six months. The book has never been out of print, reached its fiftieth edition by 1998, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. It was adapted twice for the screen, first as a live TV drama broadcast by NBC in March 1956 and subsequently as the classic British film A Night to Remember starring Kenneth More.
Lord's book was followed by The Maiden Voyage (1968) by the British naval historian Geoffrey Marcus, which told the entire story of the disaster from the passengers' departure to the subsequent public inquiries. He blamed Captain Smith and the White Star Line for the failings that led to the disaster and castigated what he called the "official lie" and "planned official prevarication" of the British inquiry. It was well-received, with Lord himself describing it as "penetrating and all-inclusive."
In 1986 Walter Lord wrote a sequel to his A Night to Remember titled The Night Lives On, in which he expressed second thoughts about some of what he wrote in his previous work. As Michael Sragow, writer and editor for The Baltimore Sun, noted: "[Lord] wondered whether Lightoller had carried the chivalrous rule of women and children first too far, to women and children only."
Post-discovery books :-
The discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 spurred a fresh wave of books, with even more published following the success of James Cameron's film Titanic and the centenary of the disaster in 1997 and 2012, respectively. Robert Ballard told the story of his search and discovery of the ship in his 1987 book The Discovery of the Titanic, which became a best-seller; Rasor describes it as "the best and most impressive" of the accounts of the search. John P. Eaton and Charles A. Haas produced Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy: A Chronicle in Words and Pictures in 1986, a 320-page illustrated volume telling the story of Titanic in great detail from design and fitting-out, through to the maiden voyage, the disaster and the aftermath. The book takes a heavily visual approach with many contemporary photographs and pictures, and is described by Anderson as "encyclopedic [and] comprehensive" and "the consummate Titanic guide."
Wyn Wade's 1992 book The Titanic: Disaster of a Century attempts to re-tell the story of the ship from financing and construction all the way through to the rescuing of survivors by the RMS Carpathia. Then it takes the reader into the investigation of the disaster by the United States Senate, led by Michigan Senator William Alden Smith. The book concludes with a look at resulting legislation and its legacy in society. In trying to draw lessons from these events, Wade writes, "Titanic was the incarnation of man's arrogance in equating size with security; his pride in intellectual (divorced from spiritual) mastery; his blindness to the consequences of wasteful extravagance; and his superstitious faith in materialism and technology. What is alarming is how much these pitfalls still typify the Western – especially the English-speaking – world of today in our continuing Age of Anxiety. As long as this self-same Hubris is with us, Titanic will continue to be not just a haunting memory of the recurrent past, but a portent of things to come – a Western apocalypse, perhaps, wherein the world, as Western man has known and shaped it, is undermined from within, not overcome from without; and ends not in holocaust but with a quiet slip into oblivion".
Don Lynch's Inside the Titanic (1997) presents an overview of the ship and the disaster, illustrated by the artist Ken Marschall, whose pictures of Titanic and other lost ships have become famous. Susan Wels' book Titanic: Legacy of the World's Greatest Ocean Liner (1997) documents the salvage work of RMS Titanic Inc, while Daniel Allen Butler provides a scholarly examination of the Titanic story in his book Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic. Robin Gardiner's books Riddle of the Titanic and Titanic: The Ship that Never Sank, put forward a conspiracy theory that the wreck is actually that of the RMS Olympic, which supposedly the White Star Line had secretly switched with Titanic as part of an insurance scam.
Novels :-
A variety of novels set aboard the Titanic has been produced over the years. One of the earliest was the German author Robert Prechtl's Titanic, first published in Germany in 1937 and subsequently in Britain in 1938 and in the US in 1940 (translated into English). The main protagonist and hero of the novel is John Jacob Astor; the book focuses on the theme of redemption, though it takes a markedly anti-British stance. It is considered the first serious Titanic novel.
One of the most famous novels associated with the disaster is a book written by Morgan Robertson fourteen years prior to the Titanic's maiden voyage, Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan. Published in 1898, the book is noted for its similarities with the actual sinking. It tells the story of a huge ocean liner, the Titan, which sinks in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage after colliding with an iceberg. The Titan is depicted as only slightly larger than Titanic, both ships have three propellers and carry 3,000 passengers, both have watertight compartments, both are described as "unsinkable" and both have too few lifeboats "as required by law". The collision is described within the novel's first twenty pages; the rest of the book deals with the aftermath. The similarities between art and life were recognised immediately in 1912 and the book was republished soon after the sinking of Titanic, with several editions being published since then.
Thriller author Clive Cussler wrote the successful Raise the Titanic! in 1976, which was made into a hugely expensive flop of a movie four years later. The same theme was reflected in The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990) by Arthur C. Clarke, which tells the story of two competing expeditions seeking to raise both halves of the wreck in time for the centenary of the sinking in 2012. An earlier Clarke novel Imperial Earth, (1976, but set in the late 23rd century AD) mentions that the Titanic has been raised and is now a museum exhibit in New York City.
The ship becomes the backdrop for a romance in Danielle Steel's 1991 novel No Greater Love, in which a young woman becomes the sole caregiver for her siblings after her parents and fiancée die in the sinking. In 1996 NBC adapted it into a TV movie of the same name, which Anderson characterises as "rather sterile and perfunctory."
Voyage on the Great Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, RMS Titanic, 1912 by Ellen Emerson White is a fictional diary of a girl travelling on the Titanic - part of the Dear America series, in which each book is a fictional diary set at a significant point in American history.
Various authors have also used Titanic as the setting for murder mysteries, as in the case of Max Allan Collins' 1999 novel The Titanic Murders, part of his "disaster series" of murder mysteries set amidst famous disasters. The writer Jacques Futrelle, who perished in the disaster, takes the role of amateur detective in solving a murder aboard Titanic shortly before her fatal collision.
In 1996 Beryl Bainbridge published Every Man for Himself, which won the Whitbread Award for Best Novel that year as well as being nominated for the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The title comes from some of the reputed last words of Titanic's Captain Smith and features a fictional nephew of J. P. Morgan, the ultimate owner of the ship, who seeks to befriend and seduce the rich and famous aboard the ship. He accompanies Thomas Andrews as the ship sinks and makes his escape aboard a capsized lifeboat (like Sherlock Holmes). The book incorporates a number of myths and conspiracy theories about Titanic, notably Robin Gardiner's claim that she was switched for her sister ship Olympic.
Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic (1997), written by ex-Python Terry Jones from an outline by Douglas Adams, tells the story of a doomed starship launched before she was finished. The ship's architect, Leovinus, undertakes an investigation to find out why the ship underwent a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure shortly after launch. A computer game based on the book was released in 1998.
Connie Willis's Passage (2001) is a story about a researcher who takes part in an experiment to simulate near-death experiences. During these experiences, instead of the classic images of angels, the researcher finds herself on the Titanic. The book details her efforts to understand the meaning of her visions and with history of the ship and its sinking.
In TimeRiders (2010) by Alex Scarrow, Liam O'Conner, a fictional steward on the Titanic, is rescued during the sinking by a man named Foster, who brings him forwards in time to September 11, 2001 in order to recruit him into an entity known as 'The Agency' which was set up to prevent destructive time travel.
In James Morrow's short story "The Raft of the Titanic", only nineteen people died in the sinking; the rest are saved.
That Fatal Night: The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton (2011), a book in the Dear Canada series, is set after the disaster and features a fictional heroine trying to cope with the events.
In Stephen Baxter's 2017 sequel to The War of the Worlds, The Massacre of Mankind, the Titanic is mentioned as having survived its encounter with the iceberg due to it being armored with aluminum developed from Martian technology.
Alma Katsu's 2020 novel The Deep is set partially on the Titanic and on its sister ship, the HMHS Britannic.
Video games :-
Since the discovery of the wreck, several video games have been released with an RMS Titanic theme for various platforms; most of these are either about the player being a passenger on the doomed ship trying to escape, or a diver exploring and possibly trying to raise the wreck. One game, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, was released in 1996 by Cyberflix, one year prior to James Cameron's film.
In the 1999 video game Duke Nukem: Zero Hour the level Going Down features the Titanic.
In the 2010 video game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the main characters were all put onto a sinking ship by a mysterious person named Zero. In their introduction, Zero references the Titanic's sinking in the line "On April 14, 1912... the famous ocean liner Titanic crashed into an iceberg. After remaining afloat for 2 hours and 40 minutes, it sank beneath the waters of the North Atlantic. I will give you more time. 9 hours is the amount of time you will be given to escape." It is later discovered that the "ship" they are on is a replica of one of Titanic's sister ships, the Gigantic. In real life, Gigantic was rumored to have been the original name of the HMHS Britannic, which was one of the Titanic's sister ships.
In the 2013 video game BattleBlock Theater a ship with two funnels bearing the name Titanic is briefly seen during a cutscene.
Since 2012, a video game titled Titanic: Honor and Glory has been in development by Four Funnels Entertainment. According to the developers, the game will feature a fully interactive recreation of the ship and the port of Southampton, and will include a tour mode of the ship in port, and a story mode told mostly in real time.
An independent video game, Fall of the Titanic, was in development in 2015, but in August 2016, the creator disabled the ability to purchase it on Steam and hasn't been heard from since.
The entirety of the RMS Titanic was recreated in a custom-made campaign for Left 4 Dead 2 in 2013. The floorplans are accurate, but are split into four chapters (maps) for gameplay purposes (from F Deck to the Boat Deck).
A level for the Zombies game mode in the 2018 video game Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is set on a fictionalized version of the Titanic.
Visual Media :-
American artist Ken Marschall has painted Titanic extensively - depictions of the ship's interior and exterior, its voyage, its destruction and its wreckage. His work has illustrated numerous written works about the disaster including books and magazine stories and covers and he was a consultant on James Cameron's successful Titanic film.
Memorabilia :-
The disaster prompted the production of collectibles and memorabilia, many of which had overtly religious overtones. Collectible postcards were in great demand in Edwardian England; in an era when domestic telephones were rare, sending a short message on a postcard was the early-20th-century equivalent of a text message or a tweet. A few postcards were published before the disaster showing Titanic under construction or newly completed and became objects of great demand afterwards. Even more desirable to collectors were the small number of postcards that had been written aboard Titanic during her maiden voyage and posted while she was in the harbours at Cherbourg and Queenstown.
After the sinking, memorial postcards were issued in huge numbers to serve as relics of the disaster. They were often derived from 19th-century religious art, showing grieving maidens in stylised poses alongside uplifting religious slogans. For many devout Christians the disaster had disturbing religious implications; the Bishop of Winchester characterised it as a "monument and warning to human presumption", while others saw it as divine retribution: God putting Man in his place, as had happened to Noah. The final location of Titanic, in the abyss 12,000 feet (3,700 m) down, was interpreted as a metaphor for hell and purgatory, the Christian Abyss. One particular aspect of the sinking became iconic as a symbol of piety – the reputed playing by the ship's band of the hymn Nearer, My God, To Thee as she went down. The same hymn and slogan was repeated on many items of memorabilia issued to memorialise the disaster.
Bamforth & Company issued a hugely popular postcard series in England, showing verses from the hymn alongside a mourning woman and Titanic sinking in the background.
There was only a limited number of surviving photographs of Titanic, so some unscrupulous postcard publishers resorted to fakery to satisfy public demand. Photographs of her sister ship Olympic were passed off as being Titanic. A common mistake made in fake photographs was that of showing the ship's fourth funnel billowing smoke; in fact, the funnel was a dummy, added for purely aesthetic purposes. Photographs of the Cunard Line vessels Mauretania and Lusitania were retouched and passed off as the Titanic, or even as the Carpathia, the vessel which rescued the Titanic survivors. Other postcards celebrated the bravery of the male passengers, the crew and especially the ship's musicians.
A variety of other collectible items was produced, ranging from tin candy boxes to commemorative plates, whiskey jiggers, and even teddy bears. One of the most unusual items of Titanic memorabilia was the 655 black teddy bears produced by the German manufacturer Steiff. In 1907 the company produced a prototype black teddy bear that was not a commercial success. Buyers disliked the gloomy appearance of the black-furred bear. After the Titanic disaster the company produced a limited run of 494 black "mourning bears" which were displayed in London shop windows. They rapidly sold out, and a further 161 were produced between 1917 and 1919. They are today among the most sought-after of all teddy bears. One pristine example was sold in December 2000 at Christie's of London after emerging from a cupboard where its owner, who disliked the bear's appearance, had kept it for 90 years. It sold for over £91,000 ($136,000), far more than had been expected.
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