PERHAPS NO EVENT OF THE PAST has achieved legendary status so quickly, and has remained there so enduringly, as the sinking of the Titanic. It has become, in the words of Michael McCaughan, a "root metaphor" of late-20th-century cultural consciousness, the "essence of modernity" and "a signifier of the civilized world".[1] George Orwell once wrote that nothing related to the First World War "moved me so deeply as the loss of the Titanic". Teaching at a British university in the 1970s, Jeremy Hawthorn found that his students knew more about the Titanic than the Holocaust.[2] Irish literary critic and cultural historian John Wilson Foster interprets the universal fascination with the Titanic myth as a symptom of post-modern malaise. "We choose to see in the ship and the human tragedy of its sinking", he writes, "meanings that derive from our sense of an ending, our sense that the ship symbolizes our culture in crisis".[3] In popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic, and to some extent elsewhere too, the ship has "survived the transit from tragedy to legend to timeless myth, and her position as a symbol of human fallibility, frailty, hubris and heroism has proved to be both unassailable and highly salable".[4]

Long before the release of James Cameron’s remarkably successful film in 1997, the Titanic exercised its almost magical appeal. Year after year, the most popular artefact at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax has been the deck chair from the Titanic.[5] Articles salvaged from the wreck site by American and French diving expeditions in the late 1980s drew record-breaking crowds; in the summer of 1995, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England extended its exhibition of Titanic artefacts by six months to accoma similar exhibit in Memphis, Tennessee attracted almost as many visitors as the venue’s inaugural exhibition.[7] Notwithstanding the power of Hollywood marketing, the fact remains that this was a story that did not require promotion in the traditional sense. The plot was so well-known, and so often told — in literature, films and popular music — that it almost seemed foolhardy to think that moviegoers could be lured into theatres to watch it unfold yet one more time.

What follows is an attempt to broaden our understanding of how the loss of the Titanic became such a defining moment in 20th-century popular culture[8] by analyzing the so-called "instant books" sold in great numbers in the weeks following the disaster. The Titanic instant books played a crucial role in shaping public perceptions of this tragic event; they belonged to a well-established and distinctive disaster narrative form that had evolved over several decades from the 1870s to the 1910s. This study also addresses how subsequent literary interpretations and cultural meanings of the Titanic myth both modified and reinforced the messages codified in the first books to appear about the tragedy.[9]

The "instant books" sold door-to-door in most parts of North America in 1912 were the most widely distributed and accessible sources of information about the Titanic disaster. Although newspapers covered the story initially, readers who wanted a fuller, more detailed account of what happened could read one of four books: Logan Marshall, The Sinking of the Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters, Marshall Everett, The Story of the Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic, Thomas H. Russell, Sinking of the Titanic and Sinking of the Titanic by Jay Henry Mowbray. All four provided survivor reports, newspaper stories gathered from a variety of sources, the findings of the two investigations (one American, the other British) into the causes of the disaster and, significantly, better-quality photographs.[10] Owners of these books today often assume they are rare. In fact they are quite common and frequently turn up at flea markets, auctions and used bookstores for about $10 to $40 (U.S.). Predictably, asking prices soared after the release of Cameron’s film in December 1997.[11] Examining the role these books may have played in popularizing the Titanic story requires closer examination of the nature of 19th- and early 20th- century book publishing in the United States and Canada. The Titanic books occupied a small niche within a much larger industry that marketed hardbacks by subscription — sold door-to-door on a vast scale from about 1850 to 1950.[12] Keith Arbour’s recent catalogue of the Michael Zinman collection at the University of Pennsylvania, possibly the richest inventory yet assembled of subscription publishing material, represents a significant breakthrough in the study of this trade.[13] By cross-referencing the holdings of this collection with online used book databases, as well as the holdings of selected academic libraries in the United States and Canada, it was found that instant disaster books were being produced in the Maritime Provinces, just as they were elsewhere in eastern North America, as early as the 1870s, and that such books were still being produced in the region as late as 1904.[14]

Subscription books, also known as "dollar books" because of the average cost for the cloth-bound edition (deluxe, leather-bound editions cost slightly more), were mass-produced and sold by travelling salesmen and women who knocked on doors "with their collections of sample books, trying to sign up customers". Itinerant bookselling, using publishers’ prospectuses, can be traced at least as far back as early 17th-century England, but the North American version of the trade probably started in Connecticut in the 1830s.[15] Peddling non-subscription religious tracts was also prevalent in the early colonial period, encouraged by Puritan leaders such as Cotton Mather, and evolving in tandem with evangelical missionary work that is still carried on by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons to this day.[16] Book hawkers sold Bibles and other devotional literature door-to-door throughout North America in the 19th century — a practice known as colportage. One such person was New Brunswick native Sarah Emma Edmonds, who — disguised as a man — sold Bibles for a Hartford, Connecticut company in the 1850s. When the Civil War broke out, she served in the Union army, again in male dress, and wrote a best-selling autobiography about her exploits.[17] Indeed, the Civil War appears to have fostered the door-to-door trade: books about war heroes such as General Ulysses S. Grant sold well in the 1870s, and many war veterans became agents for subscription book companies.[18] Colporteurs from New England were peddling devotional literature in Nova Scotia in the 1860s.[19] Keith Arbour cites several first-hand accounts of what it was like to be a book agent in the United States, many of them authored by women.[20] An online essay at the University of Virginia details how Mark Twain exploited door-to-door sales and includes "Adventures of a Woman Book Agent" in California in the 1870s.[21] One subscription book publisher unabashedly targeted "farmers’ sons, students, teachers, ministers, and women" as potential agents, apparently believing that they would "find canvassing a way of supplementing their incomes".[22]

By the end of the 19th century, the same distribution methods were being used to market secular publications concerning a wide variety of topics and produced in several languages.[23] They covered diverse subjects such as African-Americana, women’s health and etiquette, juvenile adventure, the Civil War, election campaigns, polar exploration, world travel and religion. Military topics in this age of imperialism were also popular.[24] Well-known authors whose works were sold by subscription included Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Leacock, Harriet Beecher Stowe and especially Mark Twain, who refused to sell his books any other way.[25] The Zinman Collection includes approximately 2,300 titles produced between 1833 and 1951 by more than 700 authors and publishing firms in 33 American states and four Canadian provinces.[26] Relatively few books sold by subscription could be classified as "instant" books designed to cash in on the notoriety of a recent event, but wars, politics, economic and social issues, and even British royalty furnished opportunities for the instant book trade.[27] The Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley assassinations all spawned instant books — including one by Russell H. Conwell, already the author of two "instant" accounts of major fires.[28]

The peak years for door-to-door bookselling were between 1870 and 1900. Thus the Titanic instant books appeared at a time when the subscription trade as a whole was showing signs of decline. A new copyright law passed in the United States in 1891 closed loopholes previously exploited by enterprising door-to-door publishers, many of whom were Canadian. Meanwhile, as plying their trade became more and more difficult, book agents gained a reputation for being aggressive and unscrupulous.[29] Whereas earlier subscription titles were often elaborate and even garish in appearance (one suspects because the books were put on display as much as they were actually read), the Titanic book publishers eschewed frills such as gilt-edged pages or marbled endpapers. Clearly, the primary objective was getting the product quickly to market while memories of the event were still fresh.[30] The books are replete with unconfirmed reports, exaggerated eyewitness accounts and suspect photographs. For instance, most of the exterior and interior shots of the Titanic reproduced in the instant books were actually those of her sister ship, the Olympic.

Though far from being definitive accounts of the disaster, the Titanic instant books sold well. One publisher’s promotional material claimed an initial press run of 400,000 copies, the "largest sale on record of any book in so short a time".[31] Compiling national statistics on book sales was relatively new in 1912, and no Titanic instant books were listed among the non-fiction best-sellers for that year.[32] This is not surprising, since publishers at the time were notoriously secretive about sales figures, so that leading authors seldom knew precisely how many of their books had been sold.[33] The retail book trade disparaged subscription selling in any event, and therefore lacked both the means and desire to track sales in this sector of the business.[34] While exact figures remain elusive, current circumstantial evidence supports claims of large sales. In 1992, the Massachusetts-based Titanic Historical Society reported fielding more questions about them than any other Titanic-related collectible. After the Cameron film’s release, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic received so many inquiries from people with Titanic instant books in their possession that a form letter was prepared to respond to them all.[35] On eBay, the largest online auction house on the Internet, dozens of copies of the books continue to be put up for bid by sellers across North America.

The Titanic instant books most frequently seen in the Atlantic Region are the two most common titles: Logan Marshall’s The Sinking of the Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters and Marshall Everett’s The Story of the Wreck of the Titanic. Another fairly common edition was the red-covered Sinking of the Titanic —The World’s Greatest Sea Disaster. Usually attributed to Thomas H. Russell, versions also exist with Marshall Everett as editor. Confusion reigns among collectors about the number of Marshall Everett editions because of anomalies such as the cover and title page having different titles and versions of the book with Everett’s name on the spine and Thomas Russell’s name on the title page. These are all indications of the haste with which the books were manufactured. Everett was the pseudonym for Henry Neil, a journalist who earned his spurs in the "memorial" trade by writing books on assassinated U.S. President William McKinley (1901), the tragic fire at the Iroquois theatre in Chicago (1904) and the San Francisco earthquake (1906).[36] Although Everett’s publishing record seems to place him in Chicago, one edition of his Great Chicago Theater Disaster (1904) was actually published in Halifax, Nova Scotia.[37] Among other things, Henry Neil authored, under his real name, photographic studies of the Holy Land and a how-to encyclopedia.[38] Logan Marshall was less prolific, having published only a biography of Teddy Roosevelt. In promotional literature for The Sinking of the Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters, however, his publisher styled Marshall as "an experienced writer" whose version of the Titanic story would be superior to "catchpenny books hastily prepared from newspaper clippings". Interestingly, this pitch was directed not at the general public but to sales agents: "See that the books you deliver have the name Logan Marshall on the title page", read one prospectus.[39] The fourth Titanic book frequently seen in Atlantic Canada is the blue-covered edition by Jay Henry Mowbray, which seems to be both scarcer and less prone to sloppy editing. Mowbray had at least two "instant" titles to his credit before compiling his collection of Titanic survivors’ stories.[40] He was the only one among the four leading authors of Titanic instant books who did not go on to write other disaster books after 1912.[41]

One of the rarest instant books is the paperback edition issued by Laird & Lee of Chicago entitled The Great Titanic Disaster. The editor was Thomas H. Russell, but the text is identical to the hardback Everett.[42] A German version of the same book also appeared under the title Das Ende der Titanic. Laird & Lee produced a wide range of popular titles, from how-to books on fortune-telling, astrology and hypnotism to classics by Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky and Jules Verne. They also published children’s adventure stories (at least two of which were set in Nova Scotia)[43] and popular fiction with western or detective themes. The company had a long track record of publishing both picture books (1893 Chicago World’s Fair; 1904 St. Louis Exposition)[44] and disaster books on the Johnstown Flood, the Chicago Iroquois Theater fire and the San Francisco earthquake.[45] A whole chapter in the Everett/Russell Titanic text was devoted to one of Laird & Lee’s most successful writers, the British journalist William T. Stead, who lost his life on the Titanic.[46]

The Titanic instant hardbacks have enjoyed remarkable longevity considering how hastily they were produced. Not only are the originals sought after as collectibles, but three of the four have been reissued.[47] In 1997, a Seattle company reprinted Logan Marshall’s The Sinking of the Titanic, followed by Nimbus Publishing of Halifax in 1998.[48] Dover Publications of Mineola, New York has reissued Mowbray’s Sinking of the Titanic (1998), and publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have released versions of Everett’s Story of the Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic.[49] These reprints do not appear to provide critical commentary identifying errors in their content. For example, promotional literature issued by Nimbus Publishing refers to their reprint of the Logan Marshall book as "the original 1912 classic account" that "contains all the vital facts and information concerning . . . the famous vessel".[50] There is no hint that this was just one of many "quickie" titles produced to cash in on a public obsession. At least the California entrepreneur reissuing the Marshall Everett book admitted that publishing a century ago was "exactly like today", and that the Titanic instant books were "a flash in the pan: ‘Let’s get this out and make some money on it’".[51]

Since many editions have no place of publication or publisher, determining the provenance of Titanic instant books is no simple task. The Titanic Historical Society reports there were at least nine different binding colours, giving the impression that many different publishers were involved in their production; however, the similarity in content and interchangeability of editors belies this notion. In fact, the instant books on the Titanic all originated with a few firms situated in or near Chicago and Philadelphia, the two centres of the subscription book trade. The John C. Winston Company (head offices in Philadelphia with branches, at various times, in Chicago, Toronto and New York) was probably the largest firm involved. Founded in 1884, it specialized in juvenile and popular literature, although the company had originally intended to publish mainly photographic albums. Upon acquiring the International Bible Agency in 1892, John C. Winston also became one of the largest Bible producers in North America.[52]

An obvious link exists between the red-covered Russell, the green-covered Everett and the Laird & Lee paperback because they all shared the same copyright holder, L. H. Walter.[53] When specified, the publisher of the Everett book was Homewood Press of Chicago, whose catalogue embraced a wide range of topics, including the Oliver Optic boys’ adventure series, Victorian travel narratives and a rare study of African-American servicemen in the First World War.[54] Some editions of the Russell book were published by the National Bible House of Chicago, suggesting another link between the Titanic books and colportage. A similar connection was evident in the Minter Company of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which focused almost exclusively on Christian fundamentalist literature, publishing titles such as The Devil’s Bride: A Present Day Arrangement of Formalism and Doubt in the Church and in Society (ca. 1900), Mr. World and Miss Church Member — A 20th Century Allegory (1903) and Sermons by the Devil (1904). Jay Mowbray’s blue-covered Sinking of the Titanic might appear to be an odd addition to the Minter catalogue; however, three years earlier the firm had published his book on the Messina earthquake, and three years before that San Francisco’s Great Disaster by Sydney Tyler, both instant disaster narratives.[55] Publishers of religious material clearly saw potential in promoting such events as allegorical homilies long before the Titanic made its fateful voyage. Indeed, apocalyptic interpretations of the disaster nearly identical to Alma White’s The Titanic Tragedy: God Speaking to the Nations (1912) continue to be published in the 1990s.[56]

Selling books by subscription presented significant advantages to the publisher. Production runs could be planned more precisely, thus reducing warehousing and overhead costs. Agents could pitch the product before it was ready to ship — this worked especially well for instant books seeking to capitalize on a recent news story. Guidelines included in the prospectus for The Tragic Story of the Empress of Ireland (1914), for example, advised salesmen to "strike hard while the interest in the subject is at fever heat" in order to "secure the greatest results". Soliciting orders in advance ensured a sale even after the novelty of the story had worn off. One Titanic prospectus assured readers that the final product would be more elaborate, more accurate and more complete than the salesman’s sample, which had been rushed into print due to "demand by our agents for canvassing outfits at [the] earliest possible moment".[57] In this way, disasters, wars and other high profile news events made ideal fodder for instant books, not only because consumer interest was high but also because the publisher minimized advertising costs.

In the case of the Titanic, all that was necessary was a small notice such as the one published in the Halifax Morning Chronicle, barely two weeks after the disaster:

Agents — Fastest selling book of the century; destruction of the steamship TITANIC, the Ocean’s greatest tragedy; over 1600 souls to watery graves; don’t depend upon newspaper reports; get facts; duty paid; best terms; outfit free. J.S. ZIEGLER Co., Chicago.[58]

Curiously, none of the Titanic instant books were published by J.S. Ziegler, but several pre-1912 titles of similar type were.[59] Since Marshall Everett was the editor of one, it is probable that the book referred to in the above advertisement was Story of the Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic.[60] Free copies of the Everett book were being offered in Chicago a month after the disaster as premiums to "everyone who will send . . . $2.00 (Canada $2.50) for a year’s subscription to the Saturday Blade and Chicago Ledger".[61] By the middle of June 1912, copies of Everett were in the hands of customers in southern New Brunswick.[62] Another advertisement, published in a Newfoundland weekly in late May 1912, was also probably referring to the Everett book:

TITANIC Wreck of "Titanic" largest best written, best illustrated and most attractive book ever offered public for $1.00 Agent wanted. Biggest commission ever. Freight prepaid. Outfit free. Send 10cts. Cost mailing. Rush to day to Maritime Publishing Co., Box 94 St. John, N.B.[63]

Similar notices appeared in newspapers elsewhere. Keith Arbour states that they were "particularly effective in attracting first-time agents". In at least one instance, a 12-year-old boy was selling copies of the Everett instant book in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.[64]

The campaign to publicize and sell Titanic books was extremely ambitious and highly successful, but the books were certainly not unique; accounts of disasters are commonplace in the Western literary tradition. One of the earliest examples in North America was An Account of the Great Fire in Newburyport [Massachusetts], published in 1811. The pamphlet contained three defining characteristics of the genre. There was journalistic reportage (the title page reads "taken principally from the statements which have appeared in the public newspapers"). It included sensational imagery (the cover engraving depicts a suitably dramatic scene of "people fleeing in the street and a hand pump crew working the fire"). And there was overt sentimentality, often verging on the maudlin (a poem about the disaster). The publication date of 1811 for this "second edition, improved" demonstrated how soon after the event (31 May) it went to press.[65]

Disastrous fires were so much a part of 19th-century life that producing a pamphlet memorializing the event could hardly be considered novel.[66] Indeed, large fires were almost always memorialized in some way, most often in poetry and folk ballads.[67] A truly extraordinary disaster was required to trigger instant book publishing. The great Chicago fire of 1871 was such an event. It inspired a torrent of instant literature ranging from gilt-edged, hardcover accounts to sensational, cheaply-made paperbacks.[68] Some of these publications originated in Canada.[69] Most emphasized visual content and were attentive to historical detail. Sheahan and Upton’s 1871 book The Great Conflagration, for example, included "a condensed history of Chicago, its population, growth and great public works. And a statement of all the great fires of the world".[70] In the prefatory statement to his book on the 1872 Boston fire, Russell H. Conwell expressed a desire to "place before the present generation a readable and trustworthy account" that will also serve "future demands" of writers and scholars. The result was methodical to the point of tedium, from "Boston’s first settler" to separate chapters on the Militia, Fire and Police Departments.[71] Conwell repeated the formula a few years later in his book on the Great Saint John Fire, as did virtually all instant disaster narratives that came after.

Several instant books were rushed into print in the wake of the 1889 Johnstown flood,[72] but it was the 1900 Galveston hurricane — still the deadliest natural disaster in United States history — that spawned the prototype for subsequent disaster narratives.[73] The Great Galveston Disaster by Paul Lester contained first-hand survivors’ accounts and "many photographs taken immediately after the disaster".[74] Editions of Lester’s book were published in several U.S. cities, and in Saint John, N.B. by Robert A.H. Morrow.[75] In fact, Morrow seems to have made a career of sorts producing disaster narratives: he published an edition of George Stewart’s account of the 1877 Saint John fire, as well as James Herbert Walker’s sensational account of the 1889 Johnstown flood. Morrow also wrote a self-published book on the Springhill mine disaster of 1891 under the pseudonym "Ishmael". It later appeared in a second edition under his real name.[76]

The instant books about the Galveston disaster adopted a style and format that was replicated again and again. Catastrophes were no more frequent in the first decade of the 20th century than at any other time, yet several titles appeared in quick succession on the Mont Pelee volcanic eruption in Martinique (1902), the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, the Baltimore fire in 1904, the burning of the steamboat General Slocum on the Hudson River (also in 1904), the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and the 1908 earthquake in Messina, Italy.[77] By the time the Titanic books arrived, the pattern was well established: covers featured a paste-down graphic, content was a pastiche of newspaper articles, first-hand accounts and moralistic sermons, leavened with photographs, sketches, maps and other illustrations accenting the sensational and often gruesome aspects of the event. Illustrations were all-important, appealing as they did not only to children, but also to recent immigrants still grappling with the intricacies of the English language.[78] The books were so similar in form that many even used the same frontispiece: an image of a weeping angel, with the words "In Memoriam" and sufficient white space to allow insertion of the latest disaster.

Effective though they were, most instant disaster books are viewed as unreliable primary source documents. The Complete History of the Johnstown and Conemaugh Valley Flood by George T. Ferris appeared "but one month" after the "cataract of destruction" claimed at least 2,500 lives in May 1889. The book’s author attempted to distance it from similar publications by pointing out that it "has not been hurriedly compiled from newspaper reports", but instead drew from "on the spot" interviews with survivors and press reports by journalists "who were first on the scene". Instead of photographs, the Ferris book contained "Forty-Eight Full-Page Engravings, Made Expressly for the Work". Presumably the publisher’s specialty in Biblical subjects provided little incentive to invest in photographic reproduction equipment.[79] Willis Fletcher Johnson’s History of the Johnstown Flood, available by subscription for $1.50, was cheaper than the Ferris book, but it promised readers a "well illustrated" account "from maps, photographs, etc. so that these terrible experiences are made vividly life-like".[80] Two points are worth making here. First, photographs undermined, to some extent, authors’ control over the narrative, as it had to be adapted to suit the content of the images. Second, a distinction needs to be made between accounts written by single authors, which typified late-19th-century disaster books, and those produced by editors, the norm after 1900. The latter process was by far the quickest, but it led to uneven, disjointed narratives. Publishers often claimed to provide "comprehensive and connected" accounts after 1900, but increasingly they relied on already published material in order to speed up the production process.[81]

A few instant book authors openly admitted the difficulties of producing an accurate chronicle of events on such short notice. "My book has many imperfections", wrote George Stewart in his 1877 account of the Saint John Fire. "It was necessary that it should be hastily prepared [because] my publishers . . . gave me a fortnight to write it in".[82] The publishers of History of the Johnstown Flood promised "A Timely Book and a Book for All Time", but as time went on, it became clear that the former took precedence over the latter as publishers intensified their exploitation of the subscription method to sell cheap publications to a mass audience.

By the turn of the century, photographs were supplanting text as the means to achieve quality, accuracy and visual impact. One such example on the San Francisco earthquake warned against purchasing "cheap trashy books with so-called pictures drawn by artists who never saw San Francisco".[83] Another promised "nearly 100 half-tone engravings of photographs, maps and portraits".[84] The Lester book on the Galveston hurricane contained 66 photographs; the Titanic hardbacks contained about the same number. By 1914, the Bradley-Garretson Company of Brantford, Ontario promised "an astonishing array of photographs" in The Tragic Story of the Empress of Ireland by Titanic book author Logan Marshall. Salesmen were encouraged to "give plenty of time to the pictures" because they would "go a great ways toward securing the order".[85]

Several instant disaster books appeared in 1913. This strongly suggests that the Titanic books were popular. The prospectus for Logan Marshall’s Empress of Ireland claimed that his books "had a sale of over a million copies during the past two years", an entirely plausible assertion given his long list of titles.[86] The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 was also the subject of an instant book, in which the perfidy of German militarism was added to the now-familiar themes of upper class heroism and self-sacrifice.[87] However, this appears to be the last disaster-related title of this type to have been produced and sold by subscription.

Although instant books about disasters virtually disappeared after 1915, subscription selling was still employed as late as the 1940s. One of the last such books was marketed as a "Memorial History of World War II" to returning veterans.[88] Separate editions of this book were produced for the American and Canadian markets. Meanwhile, mail-order book clubs (invented by evangelist Dwight L. Moody in the 1890s) as well as magazines gradually supplanted books sold by subscription. Though no longer sold door-to-door, instant books continue to capitalize on the public’s insatiable appetite for scandal, violent conflict and sensationalism. Disasters, on the other hand, do not seem to generate the same degree of interest today, perhaps because they are so meticulously covered by other media like television.[89]

If instant books are still with us, and can be traced back to the early 19th century, was there anything noteworthy about the Titanic instant books? Were they simply mass-market novelties of dubious quality and fleeting popularity? What is most fascinating is the number of people, not just in the Maritimes but across the continent, who still have these mementos tucked away in closets, trunks and attics after so many years. According to museum curator Dan Conlin, many have been brought into the Maritime Museum in Halifax with covers missing and tattered pages, yet they remain in the family’s possession, surviving where other books of similar age and condition would long ago have been discarded.

Perhaps people purchased the Titanic instant books because they wanted a tangible and affordable link to the historic event. The persistence of the Titanic legend through memorabilia suggests that the disaster elicited the same kind of universal emotional outpouring as did the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the death of Diana Spencer, former Princess of Wales. In this respect, the Titanic door-to-door books can be seen as early precursors of modern mass-market merchandise, like videos of a royal funeral or retrospectives of a recently-deceased performing artist. To be sure, public interest in the Titanic story has intensified periodically, as with Walter Lord’s 1955 book and Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck 30 years later, but it is the extent of commemoration, in the form of memorials, monuments, observation of important dates, ceremonies, anniversaries, societies, and so on, that truly sets the Titanic apart from other disasters.[90]

Why are there so many Titanic instant books in the Maritime Provinces? First of all, the disaster struck relatively close to Maritime shores, as evidenced by the recovery and burial of victims in Halifax. Newfoundland felt a certain connection to the tragedy for similar reasons. Second, the Titanic story linked — in real terms and metaphorically — two cultural foci familiar to Maritimers: Great Britain and New England. That it was a marine disaster would have only added to feelings of identification and sympathy in a region where such occurrences were a part of everyday life (albeit on a much smaller scale). Third, the door-to-door books provided detailed coverage of the sinking that would not have been easily accessible locally in the first instance, aside from the occasional article reprinted in local newspapers. These three factors: geographic proximity, cultural affinity and untapped demand, no doubt motivated American publishers to include the region in their overall marketing strategy, and led to brisk sales in Maritime households. A fourth contributing factor that should not be overlooked is the strong evangelical content, emphasizing Biblical themes and conservative values, that would have resonated with a sizable percentage of the Maritime population. Indeed, if anecdotal reports can be taken at face value, the Titanic story was seen almost as a topical "supplement" to the family Bible — a morality tale for modern times.

The disaster narrative in its mature form evoked complex and sometimes contradictory emotions: of reverence, religious contemplation, sympathy for the misfortunes of others and at the same time morbid fascination with death and destruction. Clearly the books were influenced by the sensationalism so prevalent at that time in the popular press. Publishers emblazoned phrases such as "Death! Death! Everywhere!" and "Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times" across title pages.[91] But death in the early 20th century was in some ways more real than it is today. Life spans were shorter, and even young readers of instant books would have seen death up close, since most people died at home rather than in a hospital. If anything, modern communication advances serve to psychologically distance observers from the consequences of calamity: scenes of human suffering and death which would be extremely unsettling or traumatic to witness first hand are regularly seen on television. In a pre-television age, audiences sought out the most realistic depictions of death and destruction that they could find. Jeffrey Stanton’s exhaustive research on Coney Island turned up a dozen or so elaborate spectacles between 1902 and 1914 re-creating the disasters mentioned in this study: Galveston, Johnstown, San Francisco, Martinique, Messina and of course the Titanic. In 1909-10 Coney Island had reenactments of the "Sinking of the Republic" (a White Star liner that foundered off New York with all passengers rescued) and a "town saved from flood by telegraph operator" — exactly what did not happen in Johnstown in 1889. The Titanic was the last major disaster to be re-created at Coney Island.[92]

Did the proliferation of disaster books and the popularity of disaster-related dramatizations in the first decade of the 20th century signify heightened concern about society’s collective future? Or were these merely early examples of the kind of high-impact entertainment to which late-20th-century audiences have grown accustomed? While the "thrill factor" was certainly important, the classic disaster narratives also attempted to memorialize the event and provide the reader with moral and religious lessons. Modern disasters are rarely depicted in this way; the causes, explanations and solutions are often attributed to human rather than divine agency, and the questions raised are not moral but practical in terms of assigning liability and developing appropriate responses to similar occurrences in the future.

The rapid evolution of manufacturing processes involving popular book publishing during the last half of the 19th century is also crucial in understanding the timing and popularity of the disaster narrative genre. Keith Arbour notes that "as early as the 1830s" subscription book publishers "generally included a higher percentage of illustrations [in salesmen’s samples] than accurately represented the complete book’s make-up".[93] The introduction of linotype in the 1880s made mass-market book publishing economically feasible, and the halftone process developed around the same time permitted higher quality photographic reproduction. The scarcity of instant disaster narratives after 1920 may have been related to improvements in the quality of photographic reproduction on newsprint — particularly the advent of clay-coated paper for "glossy" mass circulation magazines. Readers could now obtain cheaper and more graphic accounts of sensational or historic events. The same shift in popular taste may help explain the disappearance of historical pageants at amusement parks. Furthermore, new media such as radio were beginning to encroach on the printed word’s monopoly on news; for example, in the case of the Hindenburg airship disaster, a radio announcer’s realtime description indelibly fixed the event in the public mind.

Why was no instant book ever produced on the 1917 explosion in Halifax Harbour? One of the first published accounts, Heart Throbs of the Halifax Horror, certainly had a title reminiscent of previous instant disaster books. The author was Stanley K. Smith, a "correspondent" who was, according to Judith Dudar, "only in Halifax for a limited time".[94] Other publications appeared locally soon after the disaster; however, there is no evidence that U.S.-based subscription book publishers were interested, even though the explosion was reported extensively in the New England press. Its Canadian locale may have been a factor, although instant books on several foreign disasters had previously found a market in the United States, notably the fire in Saint John in 1877, as well as Martinique in 1902 and Italy in 1908. Conversely, an edition of Henry Davenport Northrop’s book on the General Slocum disaster in New York had been published in Halifax in 1904.[95]

Perhaps the verbose and moralistic tone of disaster narratives was no longer fashionable by 1917. This does not imply that the Halifax disaster was completely ignored; the Underwood & Underwood Company of New York, a leading publisher of stereographic images,[96] obtained the rights to 16 photographs of scenes of devastation in Halifax, which were published in postcard form by the Novelty Manufacturing and Art Company of Montreal. According to Bernard Kline, these postcards "began to appear within weeks of the event".[97] This company also owned copyrights for the most widely distributed photographs related to the Titanic disaster, especially those taken on the Carpathia rescue ship.[98] At least two "instant" viewbooks of the devastation at Halifax were also produced locally within a few weeks of the event.[99]

Could the preponderance of photographic studies on the Halifax disaster indicate growing public preference for visual rather than written accounts of disasters? Another possible explanation is that leading American writers in the instant narrative field were not familiar enough with the subject to produce a satisfactory account. Or perhaps it was simply a question of timing — the war in Europe diverted the attention of subscription book publishers. If the disaster books that followed the Titanic did not sell as well, this would have been a disincentive to produce others. Furthermore, the war may have altered popular and philosophical notions about the meaning of disaster, raising unsettling questions about why such events occur. It was clearly easier to blame the carnage of the First World War on human greed, envy and stupidity than divine retribution. Natural disasters seemed to pale in comparison to trench warfare. And the Titanic sinking, after all, was attributable to natural causes as much as to a spectacular technological failure. The Halifax disaster by contrast, like the conflict that caused it, was entirely human in origin and thus more difficult to explain in religious or moralistic terms.

Understanding the full cultural significance of early-20th-century disaster narratives requires further study of the reasons why they seem to fall out of fashion after 1912. Had the Titanic foundered a decade later than it did, it is unlikely that the instant books published in 1912 would have been produced at all. Had the sinking occurred a decade earlier, however, the books would have looked the same because the formula had been established by 1900, if not earlier. Instant book publishers responded to the Titanic disaster by mobilizing marketing techniques developed decades before to sell everything from Bibles to guides on sexual hygiene.

The few instant disaster narratives to appear after the Titanic continued to replicate the Galveston model, such as the two books on the sinkings of the Empress of Ireland (1914) and Lusitania (1915). This was true as well of a Japanese account of the great 1923 Kwanto earthquake.[100] Herbert P. Wood’s 1982 book on the Empress of Ireland tragedy returned to the pre-First World War disaster narrative format. It even included a poem about the disaster by the author, and commentary by Joseph Conrad, published at the time in the London Illustrated News.[101]

How did the Titanic instant books contribute to the mythmaking process? A logical starting point is the hero motif, probably the most prominent aspect of the Titanic narratives and certainly characteristic of the genre. One sees it in Russell Conwell’s account of the Boston fire, in Johnson’s narrative of the Johnstown flood, in which a woman telegraph operator, Mrs. Ogle, remains at her post sending out warning messages to the last, and in an unpublished account by Archibald MacMechan of the Halifax disaster in a chapter entitled "The City Heroic".[102] The hero motif was present not only in disaster narratives but also in the dime novels that were popular at the turn of the century. James D. Hart suggests that "readers who had to conform to anonymous urban life and the confining efficiency of a mechanized age" were attracted to the notion of individual achievement in "trying times".[103] In the case of dime novels, the setting was usually historical, but it could just as easily have been the deck of the Titanic. In our own time, news media continue to highlight heroic individuals in accounts of catastrophes. Despite similarities with other disaster naratives, the persistence of the Titanic story sets it apart. Indeed, the ship has served as a backdrop for fiction by writers as diverse as Toronto wine critic Tony Aspler, Clive Cussler, Danielle Steel and Beryl Bainbridge. One could even argue, as Paul Heyer does in Titanic Legacy, that it is a touchstone myth in Western culture. Heyer sees the Titanic story as a Biblical morality tale applied in a modern context — a kind of updated version of the story of Noah’s Ark, except that a microcosm of humanity is destroyed, rather than saved, through divine intervention.[104] The power of the hero motif resists contradiction by facts. Henry Van Dyke, the prominent Presbyterian minister and academic who, by virtue of his contribution to the Logan Marshall instant book, was one of the first American religious leaders to comment publicly on the disaster, seized on the phrase "Women and Children First" to emphasize male self-sacrifice, even though the actual gender distribution of survivors tells quite a different story: Van Dyke’s distortion of the facts became the most enduring moral lesson of the Titanic tragedy because the 900 crew on board — of whom fewer than 25 were women — were almost completely ignored in the media coverage of the event.[105]

The political subtext of this morality tale, as Steven Biel points out in Down with the Old Canoe, is that the theme of male stoicism and self-sacrifice on the Titanic was used to challenge the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement. This reactionary reading of the disaster was particularly evident in Henry Van Dyke’s "message of spiritual consolation" which opens the Logan Marshall instant book. In a poem he published a few years later, Van Dyke revisits the phrase he helped make famous:[106]

"Women and children first," —

Ah, strong and tender cry!

The sons whom women had borne and nursed,

Remembered, — and dared to die.[107]

Foremost among the "sons who remembered" was the "brave and seasoned commander" Captain Edward J. Smith, who allegedly told his crew to "be British" and went gallantly down with the ship. Van Dyke pursued the theme of self-sacrifice in language that makes the modern reader cringe:

a man is stronger than a woman, he is worth more than a woman, he has a longer prospect of life than a woman. There is no reason in all the range of physical and economic science, no reason in all the philosophy of the Superman, why he should give his place in the life-boat to a woman.

But, Van Dyke concluded, it was the "Christian" thing to do. Opponents of women’s suffrage embraced the message "that manhood would endure, because both men and women had learned from the Titanic that sexual difference was natural and permanent".[108] Watching the Cameron film, journalist Charles Krauthammer wondered if other members of the audience found the plot’s faithfulness to the original scenario cobbled together in the popular press a "raging anachronism". Probably not, Krauthammer concluded, because "when blood starts to flow or ships start to sink", women are still grouped with the children.[109]

As time went on, cultural interpreters of the Titanic disaster elaborated on the initial themes of male dominance, Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and Christian self-sacrifice. In the 1930s, two major poetic works on the Titanic emerged from disparate yet oddly parallel standpoints. Newfoundland expatriate E.J. Pratt published The Titanic (1935),[110] and the Rumanian-born philosophe and poet Benjamin Fondane published Titanic: poèmes in French (1937). To Benjamin Fondane, the iceberg becomes a double metaphor signifying the fascist menace looming over Europe in the 1930s and death itself.[111] Pratt’s Titanic was a straightforward account in the epic style that reflected both the author’s east coast roots and his debt to Anglo-Saxon literary tradition.[112] Recently the Shaw Festival mounted a performance of Pratt’s Titanic in which "the voices of 12 actors combined with subtle sound effects and carefully chosen music". It was later broadcast on CBC Radio.[113]

A much better-known Titanic poem is Thomas Hardy’s "The Convergence of the Twain". Unlike Pratt’s linear narrative, in which the ordinary is tragically interrupted by the unthinkable, Hardy’s "Convergence of the Twain" suggests that the mid-ocean meeting of the titans is somehow inevitable. Hardy’s elastic chronology (iceberg and ship seem to take shape simultaneously) and psycho-sexual imagery (the collision of ship and ice is a "consummation") continue to provoke critical analysis because they evoke ideological cross-currents prevalent not only in his time but in our own. Ice and steel are merely surrogates for the inevitable clashes between humanity and nature, tradition and modernity, man and woman. Hardy’s poem also articulated theological questions that were no doubt shared by many contemporary observers. Consider for example what American journalist Fred S. Miller (writing at virtually the same time as Hardy) wrote in the Marshall Everett instant book:

Does Providence directly govern everything that is? And did the Power who preordained the utmost second of each planet’s journey, rouse up the mountain from its sleep of snow and send it down to drift, deliberately direct, into the exact moment in the sea of time, into the exact station in the sea of waters, where danced a gleaming speck – the tiny Titanic – to be touched and overborne?[114]

Here lies the fundamental question invariably posed whenever disasters challenge our faith in the existence of a higher power. It was particularly meaningful in 1912, "an age in which a belief that God foresees and ordains everything comes into conflict with a widespread secularism which assumes that certain events are purely fortuitous and can neither be predicted nor prevented".[115] "Computer simulations [are] . . . the key to a ‘preventative medicine’" for future natural catastrophes, argues one late-20th-century scientist. "If we learn enough about nonlinear mechanisms [in nature] to stabilize climate", he claims, we can "keep civilization from unraveling".[116]

Thus, from the outset the story of the Titanic was laden with symbolic meanings which continue to resonate down to the present. As the years passed, new meanings and interpretations have been added, as the ship became a setting for acting out the decline of the British empire (in Noel Coward’s 1933 Cavalcade) and a vehicle for anti-British propaganda during the Nazi regime (in Herbert Selpin’s 1943 film Titanic).[117] Sensitivity about the disaster became so acute in the 1930s that the British Chamber of Shipping took steps to prevent Alfred Hitchcock from making a film about the Titanic.[118]

Literary interest in Titanic resurfaced in the post-Second World War era, fueled in part by two feature films, one American (Titanic, 1953) and the other British (A Night to Remember, 1958). The latter was based on Walter Lord’s book of the same name. The Irish poet Anthony Cronin was clearly indebted to Lord in his lengthy 1960 treatment. Two American poets, E. Merrill Root ("When Man’s Great Ship Went Down") and Richard Ball also turned their hand to Titanic verse in the 1960s.[119] The impact of the Titanic tragedy internationally is also striking: in Scandinavia, Germany, Mexico and Chile, the story continues to engage writers. Titanic poetry appeared in German almost as quickly as in English.[120] In the 1970s, the Spanish poet José Ruiz Sánchez was inspired to write about the Titanic as was Gabriel Trujillo Munoz, a Mexican poet, essayist and "cultural journalist".[121] The German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger reworked the epic format adopted by Pratt, with markedly different results.[122] Detailed analysis of these cross-cultural connections with the Titanic myth could yield insights into why certain key historical events transcend national, linguistic and continental boundaries.[123]

Among the multiplicity of meanings derived from the Titanic story, Paul Heyer identifies communications as the dominant theme — not just the tragic failure to transmit crucial information, but also the triumph of communications technology in summoning aid to the survivors. John Wilson Foster, and to some extent Steven Biel as well, do acknowledge the trans-national universality of meanings and memorializations engendered by the Titanic tragedy. Foster even admits to being influenced by the "unavoidable Canadian engagement with cultural diversity" in developing his analysis.[124] Jeremy Hawthorn, commenting on the complex relationship between ideology, myth and history, posits the notion that "the establishment of what one can legitimately term a disaster genre is very much a modern phenomenon". He argues that the commodification of calamity, though motivated by profit, produces "ideological raw material" that has been worked and reworked ever since, "as if the Titanic’s loss were a highly coded Renaissance painting or piece of medieval church architecture".[125] Fires in the late 19th century, according to a recent study by Paulette Kilmer, were also depicted as events that somehow served a spiritual purpose and restated "ancient narrative patterns, such as the Judgement Day archetype".[126] Just as the victims of the Titanic sinking came from all walks of life, so too did fire act as a "great equalizer" when whole towns or city blocks were laid waste. Kilmer’s argument hinges on the Gilded Age preoccupation with material success and the misgivings engendered by it. Surely the Titanic story can be seen in the same way, emphasizing the apocalyptic, the heroic and the sacrificial — essentially humanistic, democratic themes — in an age when capitalism had produced a society fractured by incredible disparities of wealth and status.

Whatever its mythic and ideological resonances, calamity as a subject has not appealed to historians, perhaps because of the singularity of calamitous events. Disasters seem to lack cumulative effect on the collective psyche — hence the requirement in disaster narratives to refresh the reader’s memory with a roster of prior incidents. Natural disasters are especially susceptible to a kind of self-imposed amnesia. Each time we hear the trite phrase "storm of the century", we ought to be reminded of Galveston, Texas in 1900. But of course, we are not. The worst disaster is always the one that has just occurred. Thus the Titanic still is, for many people, the "world’s greatest marine disaster", despite other greater disasters.[127]

The Titanic instant books could not be expected to provide a complete and comprehensive account of the disaster. Even the definitive book on the disaster, Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, was as reflective of his time as the accounts compiled by Everett, Marshall, Mowbray et al. were of theirs.[128] The Titanic instant books captured the mood of the moment, and successive writers, including Lord, would rely on them. The Titanic instant books continue to transmit the essential details of the story — both mythic and factual — to succeeding generations of readers. In the preface to his new book, Titanic: The Canadian Story, Alan Hustak describes how an instant book sparked his interest:

. . . almost fifty years ago . . . my grandfather took me to an estate auction and I bought . . . Logan Marshall’s classic, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters published in 1912. I still have it. I read it and was captivated. Then I saw the movie with Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb in 1953. I was hooked.[129]

The Titanic instant books typify the period in which they were produced, combining as they do elements of yellow journalism, devotional literature, dime novel escapism and mass-market sales techniques no longer practised on such a wide scale. Just as a period piece of film footage has historical value as a primary source, even though a Heritage Minute re-enactment may be more coherent, the instant books are fine examples of historical memorabilia that reveal the public’s unending demand for both minutiae and meaning when calamity strikes.

JAY WHITE