Popular culture

Titanic has played a prominent role in popular culture ever since her sinking. The disaster has inspired numerous books, plays, films, songs, poems and works of art, and has lent itself to a great variety of interpretations of its significance, meaning and legacy. The immediate aftermath of the sinking saw an outpouring of poetry, though much of it was dismissed by The New York Times as "worthless" and "intolerably bad" and by Current Literature as "unutterably horrible",[194] though Thomas Hardy's The Convergence of the Twain (1912) was one of the more significant works to emerge from the disaster. Several survivors wrote books about their experiences[195] and various hack writers cashed in on the tragedy by producing sensationalist "dollar books" culled from the often inaccurate press coverage.[196] 1955 saw the publication of Walter Lord's influential non-fiction book A Night to Remember which weaved numerous personal accounts from survivors.
The sinking of the Titanic has been a popular subject for visual artists, whether in paintings and illustrations or on the screen. The first Titanic newsreel films were released within days of the disaster; one by the Gaumont Film Company was a huge hit and played to packed houses around the world,[197] often accompanied by the audience singing the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee at the climax of the film.[198] There have also been many drama films set aboard Titanic. The first such film about the disaster, Saved from the Titanic, was released only 29 days after the ship sank and had an actual survivor as its star – the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson.[199] The story of the sinking was also told in heavily fictionalised form as a Nazi propaganda movie (Titanic, 1943) and as an American melodrama (Titanic, 1953). The British film A Night to Remember (1958) is still widely regarded as the most historically accurate movie portrayal of the sinking,[200] but the most successful by far has been James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which became the highest-grossing film in history up to that time.[201]
A great variety of memorabilia was also produced. Memorial postcards sold in huge numbers; one popular series produced in Britain showed verses from Nearer, My God, to Thee alongside a mourning woman and Titanic sinking in the background.[202] The disaster was commemorated in numerous other forms, ranging from tin candy boxes to commemorative plates, whiskey jiggers,[203] and even black mourning teddy bears.[204] The latter are now hugely sought-after and examples have sold for over $135,000.[205] On 30 April, 2012, Clive Palmer, an Australian mining magnate declared his plans of building Titanic II, a replica of the original Titanic which he said would hopefully sail from England to New York in 2016.[206][207]