CANR
WORK TITLE: The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the ‘Titanic’ and the End of the Edwardian Era
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Belfast
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Saint Peter’s College, Oxford and Queen’s University, Belfast.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and historian.
WRITINGS
Also author of the plays The Gate of the Year, 2016, and Say You’ll Remember Me, 2016.
Popular and The Immaculate Deception have been adapted as stageplays.
SIDELIGHTS
Gareth Russell is a British writer and historian. Born in Belfast, he went on to earn degrees from Saint Peter’s College, Oxford and Queen’s University, Belfast. Russell published his first novel, Popular, in 2011. This was followed by the novel The Immaculate Deception in 2012. Russell then turned his attention to writing primarily nonfiction books centering on European and British history. Additionally, Russell wrote the stageplays The Gate of the Year and Say You’ll Remember Me in 2016.
Russell published Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII in 2017. The biography covers the life of the fifth queen of England’s Henry VIII, Catherine Howard. Russell highlights her upbringing and status in the royal court, as well as how she came to become wed to Henry VIII. The account also details the final years of Henry’s royal court.
Booklist contributor Margaret Flanagan remarked that “Russell provides a painstakingly thorough and original revaluation of” his topic. A Kirkus Reviews contributor mentioned that “Russell’s portrait effectively underscores the machinations of this volatile court, the treachery of sycophants, and the importance of the all-seeing servants.” The same reviewer found the account to be “dense with material and flavor of the epoch.” In a review in Library Journal, Marie M. Mullaney opined that readers who enjoy biographies “and those intrigued by the lives of the royals will welcome this tragic story of Henry VIII’s fifth wife.”
In 2019 Russell published The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the ‘Titanic’ and the End of the Edwardian Era, which was published in Britain as The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World. Russell frames his book on the Titanic by focusing on six first-class passengers and their families and their experiences on the fated vessel. He pieces together what they did on the ship and the luxuries afforded to the wealthiest passengers. The account also relates the decline of English aristocracy as paralleled with the rise of American industrialists, the fall of the Russian monarchy, and the Irish home rule movement.
In a review in Publishers Weekly, Russell claimed that having access to the blueprints of the ship helped him “a great deal” when writing the book. He admitted: “I could magically resurrect the Titanic. I could navigate myself through the ship, say, from the grand staircase to the squash court. Having the physical blueprints meant that I could deal with ‘eyewitness’ accounts that were colored by trauma and hysteria.”
A contributor to Publishers Weekly noticed that “Russell adroitly sketches the backgrounds of his main characters as he tracks their movements during the fateful trip.” Reviewing the book in the London Guardian, Kathryn Hughes noted that “it is hard to see what Russell adds to a story that has been worn smooth by a century’s worth of popular histories, Hollywood blockbusters and TV documentaries with terrific underwater footage.” Hughes concluded that “his portentous title suggests, he is in the business of making the Titanic story huge and metaphorical, a morality tale about the collapse of a somewhat slipshod civilisation. The result is as unconvincing as the ship’s haphazard interior, a pile-up of the gaudy and the mundane.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2017, Margaret Flanagan, review of Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII, p. 17.
Guardian (London, England), May 3, 2019, review of The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of Young and Damned and Fair.
Library Journal, February 1, 2017, Marie M. Mullaney, review of Young and Damned and Fair, p. 87.
Publishers Weekly, October 11, 2019, Martha K. Baker, “A Diminishing Era: PW Talks with Gareth Russell;” October 14, 2019, review of The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the ‘Titanic’ and the End of the Edwardian Era, p. 62.
ONLINE
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com (May 3, 2019), review of The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World.
Gareth Russell (author)
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Gareth Russell
Born
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Occupation
Author
Nationality
British
Education
Down High Grammar School
Alma mater
Saint Peter's College, Oxford
Genre
History, historical fiction, young adult fiction
Notable works
Popular
Young and Damned and Fair
Website
Author's profile
Gareth Russell is a British historian and author.
Contents
1
Early life and education
2
Career
3
Bibliography
3.1
Novels
3.2
Non-Fiction
4
Notes
5
References
6
External links
Early life and education[edit]
Gareth Russell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He attended Down High Grammar School, and later graduated from Saint Peter's College, Oxford, where he studied modern history.[1] Russell completed a Master's degree in medieval history at Queen's University, Belfast. He currently divides his time between Belfast and New York.[2]
Career[edit]
Russell is the author of a series of plays, including The Gate of the Year.[3] In July 2011, his first novel Popular was published in the UK and Ireland by Penguin, as the first in a new series of novels following the lives of a group of privileged Belfast teenagers. It was published in German as It-Girls by S. Fischer Verlag in 2014. A sequel to Popular, The Immaculate Deception, was published in November 2012. Both novels were subsequently adapted for the stage in Northern Ireland, followed by a final theatrical sequel, Say You'll Remember Me, which received its first performance in 2016.[4]
In August 2014, his first non-fiction book The Emperors: How Europe's Rulers were Destroyed by World War One was published by Amberley Publishing. In 2017, his biography of English queen consort Catherine Howard was published, based on research undertaken between 2010 and 2016.[5] It was published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Canada, and HarperCollins in the UK, Ireland, and most of the Commonwealth. In 2019, his account of the Titanic disaster was published as The Darksome Bounds of the Failing World in the UK and The Ship of Dreams in the US.[6]
Bibliography[edit]
Novels[edit]
Popular (2011)
The Immaculate Deception (2012)
Non-Fiction[edit]
The Emperors: How Europe's Rulers were destroyed by World War I (2014)
An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors (2014)
A History of the English Monarchy from Boadicea to Elizabeth I (2015)
Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII (US title) (2017)
The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era (2019)
Gareth Russell was a student at Down High Grammar School in Northern Ireland before he went onto to study Modern History at Saint Peter's College in the University of Oxford.
Gareth is the author of several plays and his first novel, Popular, was originally published in 2011 and has been updated for republication in 2012. Since 2011, Popular has been adapted for the stage on several occasions.
Gareth divides his time between Belfast, London and Connecticut. His accent is therefore best described as polymorphous, shifting with the greatest of ease from Northern Irish to English to American. This pleases him greatly. His first ever word was "shoe" and if he had to have dinner with one person from history, it would be Anne Boleyn.
Educated at Oxford University and Queens University, Belfast, Gareth Russell is a historian, novelist, and playwright. He is the author of The Ship of Dreams, Young and Damned and Fair, The Emperor, and An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors. He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
A Diminishing Era: PW Talks with Gareth Russell
By Martha K. Baker | Oct 11, 2019
Comments
In The Ship of Dreams (Atria, Dec.), historian Russell illuminates the Edwardian world and the tragedy of the Titanic.
Why did the world need another book on the Titanic?
Photo: Kelvin Boyes
Gareth Russell
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There are some fantastic studies about the sinking of the Titanic, but I was really interested in looking at it as a symbol of a diminishing era, to shift the context to make the ship a product of its time. That book had not been written, and I thought I could produce something useful on that topic.
Why did you believe that you could write this book?
I’d always had a connection to the Titanic from having been born in Belfast. My great-grandparents had told me stories of its building, and of the building of its sister ships, rising above the skyline. I felt I could marry my skills as an adult historian to what I had learned as a child. I knew I had to sieve through the research, because this was not going to be froth—it had to have heft.
What role do the ship’s blueprints play in your writing?
A great deal. With the blueprints from Linen Hall Library here in Belfast, I could magically resurrect the Titanic. I could navigate myself through the ship, say, from the grand staircase to the squash court. Having the physical blueprints meant that I could deal with “eyewitness” accounts that were colored by trauma and hysteria. I could see that cabin C-37 was very close to the stairwell and guess that the Countess of Rothes may have changed her room from C-37 to C-77 because she assumed 37 would be noisier.
Which of your characters did you most closely identify with?
Of the six I focused on, there were none I disliked, though I found the actress Dorothy Gibson frustrating. But there is indeed such a thing as a “literary Stockholm syndrome”—that is, identifying with a particular character. For me, it is Lucy Noëlle Martha Leslie, the Countess of Rothes. I experienced a wonderful learning curve piecing together her life as a suffragette and nurse. I found inspiring her desire and commitment to give back to society what she had been given.
You describe the Titanic’s impact with the iceberg as barely a nudge that some people slept through. How did you decide how to write that moment?
I did not want to detail the crew and the bridge and the boiler—that’s been done. I kept the moment of impact just to what the six people saw. I deliberately did not seek survivors’ memories, massaged for newspapers. I stayed with the actual accounts rather than the hyperbolic. That made it easier to shy away from the temptation of bombast. I wanted to underplay that moment, not to be constrained by stories but to restrain myself to what furthered the angle of the book. In many ways, that challenge was more thrilling to me as a writer.
A version of this article appeared in the 10/14/2019 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A Diminishing Era
* The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the 'Titanic' and the End of the Edwardian Era
Gareth Russell. Atria, $30 (448p) ISBN 978-1-5011-7672-2
Russell (Young and Damned and Fair) recounts the story of the Titanic through the experiences of six first-class passengers and their families in this elegantly written and impressively researched account that takes a uniquely wide-angled view of the disaster. Among those profiled are British aristocrat Noelle Leslie, countess of Rothes; Thomas Andrews, managing director of the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic was built; German-American philanthropist Ida Straus; John Thayer, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his son, Jack; and Dorothy Gibson, "one of the highest-paid actresses in the world." Russell adroitly sketches the backgrounds of his main characters as he tracks their movements during the fateful trip, drawing from hundreds of sources to describe the ship's Turkish baths, first-class dining saloon, six-course meals, and boiler rooms. Along the way, he offers crash courses in the decline of the English aristocracy, the Irish home rule movement, the rise of American industrialists, and the fallout from the 1881 assassination of czar Alexander II, among other subjects, and corrects the rumor that third-class passengers were locked in their quarters on the night the ship sank. The result is a scrupulous and entertaining portrait of "a world that was by turns victim and author of the tragedies that overtook it." Agent: Brettne Bloom, the Book Group. (Dec.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the 'Titanic' and the End of the Edwardian Era." Publishers Weekly, 14 Oct. 2019, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A603319033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ff09da13. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A603319033
Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII.
By Gareth Russell.
Apr. 2017.464p. Simon & Schuster, $30 (9781501108631). 942.05.
Though biographies of Anne Boleyn abound, Catherine Howard, her equally unfortunate cousin, remains a less studied subject and a more shadowy figure. The doomed fifth wife of Henry VIII is generally portrayed as a young, naive victim, a pawn in the royal machinations of both her predatory family and a phalanx of scheming courtiers. Russell delves deeper into her daily life, providing a more robust portrait of a complex individual whose life was inextricably intertwined with many members of the queen's household, ill-fated associations that played a more significant role in her demise than has previously been recorded. As Catherine's personal life is examined, the background figures that populated her world take on more significant roles in her rise and downfall. Living in such intimate quarters with ladies-in-waiting, page boys, secretaries, and servants, she found secrets were impossible to keep, making tragedy inevitable, given the harsh realities of Henry's reign. Russell provides a painstakingly thorough and original revaluation of both Catherine and of the mad scramble by the members of her household to protect themselves rather than their queen.--Margaret Flanagan
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490998405/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8688c2d8. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490998405
Russell, Gareth YOUNG AND DAMNED AND FAIR Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 4, 4 ISBN: 978-1-5011-0863-1
An intimate biography of Henry VIII's fifth queen: vivacious young woman who only wanted to have fun or a tragic victim of abusive elders?In his largely sympathetic portrait of Catherine Howard (1523-1542), whose youthful flirtations spelled her downfall, Irish playwright and historian Russell (The Emperors: How Europe's Rulers Were Destroyed by the First World War, 2014, etc.) renders a fully fleshed portrait of Howard based around the details of her household and intimates. Indeed, the author's study is so intricately woven in contextual detail that he often fails to see the forest for the trees--e.g., what were Catherine's true motivations; was she just a flimsy bystander to her own fate? Her pampered upbringing as a noblewoman (granddaughter to Thomas Howard, the 2nd Duke of Norfolk) and sense of natural entitlement did not shield her from her father's habitual indebtedness, and she received little in the way of formal education. Catherine was a ward of her rich aunt Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and her teenage years were dotted with infatuations--e.g., with her music teacher, Henry Manox, and her aunt's secretary, Francis Dereham. Russell sifts carefully through the evidence and dismisses the explanation of sexual abuse, as clearly Catherine was in love, especially with Dereham and later, as queen, with Thomas Culpeper, a handsome favorite of her husband. Her 16-month stint as queen revealed "the Henrician court in its twilight, a glittering but pernicious sunset," when Henry had just divorced Anne of Cleves because he disliked her and impulsively married the charming Catherine on the day Thomas Cromwell was executed, July 28, 1540. Perhaps the marriage was engineered by her uncle Norfolk, who had grown jealous and suspicious of the former Protestant chief minister. Russell's portrait effectively underscores the machinations of this volatile court, the treachery of sycophants, and the importance of the all-seeing servants. Dense with material and flavor of the epoch.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Russell, Gareth: YOUNG AND DAMNED AND FAIR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A479234516/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=208bb3a3. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234516
Russell, Gareth. Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII. S. & S. Apr. 2017.464p. illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781501108631. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781501108655. BIOG
Russell (From Albion to Zazzera) builds upon his extensive scholarly research of the 16th-century royal household to produce this sympathetic biography of Catherine Howard (1523-42). Henry VIII called Catherine "a jewel for womanhood," and married her shortly after his divorce from Anne of Cleves, for whom Catherine had served as lady-in-waiting. This portrayal shows Catherine to be an immature yet attractive girl who had the misfortune of becoming the object of Henry VIII's ardor. Russell discusses the impact that religious rivalry, international diplomacy, and court etiquette had on Catherine's precipitous fall from grace. She was executed on charges of adultery and treason after serving as queen consort for less than 16 months, well before her 21st birthday. Possibly sexually abused as a young girl, promiscuous before her marriage, and unfaithful after it, Catherine was the least politically consequential of Henry's wives, yet her story is important for what it reveals about the brutality and chauvinism of Henrician England. Highly readable and peppered with engrossing stories, this book is also fascinating for its details about what was considered sexually moral in 16th-century England. VERDICT Biography lovers and those intrigued by the lives of the royals will welcome this tragic story of Henry VIII's fifth wife. [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/16 ]--Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mullaney, Marie M. "Russell, Gareth. Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 87. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A479301272/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4baaf748. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301272
The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World by Gareth Russell – review
The Titanic as a metaphor that has rattled down the ages ... does this book work as a morality tale about the collapse of a slipshod civilisation?
Kathryn Hughes
Fri 3 May 2019 12.00 BST
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Deathtrap and metaphor … The Titanic. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
T
he story of the Titanic has been retold so often, most frequently during 2012 when the centenary of its capsizing rolled around, that it is hard to see why it would need to be done again. But perhaps that is to miss the point of Gareth Russell’s book. People who consume one thing about the Titanic tend to consume many, and there is always a shivery pleasure in accompanying old friends as they climb aboard once more, unaware that they are walking not only into a deathtrap but into a metaphor that will rattle down the ages.
In stateroom C-77 is the Countess of Rothes, the public-spirited British aristocrat who is on her way to join her husband in the US, where they will celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary. Along the corridor, in C-55 and C-57 are Isidor and Ida Straus, a devoted couple who touchingly – and vulgarly, according to the way these things are usually done in the “best circles” – choose to sleep in a double bed. They are on their way home to Macy’s, which Isidor owns, having spent the winter weeks warming their ancient bones in the south of France. One floor down, on B deck, is 47-year-old John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man on board if not in the world, who has scandalously married Madeleine Fiermonte, aged 17, now five months pregnant. Also slinking around the first-class quarters is J Bruce Ismay, the son of the founder of the White Star Line, which owns RMS Titanic. No one can stand him. It’s not that Ismay has done anything demonstrably wrong at this point – that will come later, when people start whispering about how he has managed to survive the sinking while so many other men go down. It’s just that he has an uncanny ability to misread social situations, barging into conversations that don’t concern him, and generally creeping out everyone on board, especially the ladies.
Russell hopes his travellers’ backstories will form a synoptic account of the 20th century in its debutante days
It is fun too to wander once more through the Titanic’s preposterous interior. The writing room is late Georgian, the lounge is Louis XV and the dining room has nods to Hatfield House, Elizabeth I’s childhood home. The tapestries are vaguely medieval but there’s also an unlikely smattering of cottagey pebbledash. You do, though, need to manage your expectations if you’ve got one of the cheaper first-class cabins: many of them don’t have their own lavatories, which means you’ll have to scuttle along the corridor to find the nearest shared convenience. There is no dressing for dinner on the first night, and you can’t just barge into the smoking room if you fancy a fag – it’s strictly men only. And don’t, just don’t, ask if you can have a tour of the third-class accommodation to check that the people in steerage are comfortable. At least one Lady Bountiful has attempted this version of maritime poor-visiting, and it went down badly. You can almost feel Julian Fellowes, who has done the cover blurb for Russell’s book, shuddering with embarrassment at someone so posh getting it so wrong.
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Preposterous interiors … Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the 1997 blockbuster The Titanic.
In truth it is hard to see what Russell adds to a story that has been worn smooth by a century’s worth of popular histories, Hollywood blockbusters and TV documentaries with terrific underwater footage. Even his decision to concentrate on a cluster of individual passengers has been done before by Richard Davenport-Hines in his excellent Titanic Lives. Russell’s variation on this methodology is to spend much longer on his travellers’ backstories in the hope that, plaited together, the result will be something like a synoptic account of the 20th century in its debutante days. So a section on Dorothy Gibson, a silent movie star travelling with her mother in cabin E-22, gives Russell a chance to retell the story of America’s early film industry, which is located not in California but New Jersey. Then there’s the Macy’s owner Isidor Straus, whose immigration as a nine-year-old from Bavaria to Georgia in 1854 pitches Russell into a long digression about patterns of slave-holding amongst Jewish families in the antebellum south.
Russell doesn’t stop there though. He projects the tale of his voyagers forwards too, so for instance we learn that Dorothy Gibson, who relocated to Europe in the 1920s, has an ill-advised flirtation with fascism, which nonetheless leads to her imprisonment by the Nazis in 1944. By contrast, the Countess of Rothes, who proves herself an absolute brick in one of the lifeboats, pursues a post-Titanic life of strenuous philanthropy, having discovered, she says somewhat ominously, that it is the best way she knows to be happy.
In principle there is nothing wrong with wrenching the Titanic away from its frozen moment and restoring it to the ebb and flow of ordinary time. The problem is that this isn’t what Russell really wants to do. As his portentous title suggests, he is in the business of making the Titanic story huge and metaphorical, a morality tale about the collapse of a somewhat slipshod civilisation. The result is as unconvincing as the ship’s haphazard interior, a pile-up of the gaudy and the mundane.
• The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World is published by William Collins (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.