As today marks the 111-year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we look to Lucie Rosen's journal and her newspaper clippings.
While reading through the early journals of a young and unmarried Lucie Bigelow Dodge, you start to realize that Lucie was highly interested in and aware of current events.
She wrote about politics—wondering who would win the 1912 Presidential Elections—and collected newspaper clippings--like the article on prison conditions in New York from 1913. The sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 was impossible not to notice. Despite not writing anything specifically about the Titanic or its sinking, Lucie meticulously cut and carefully pasted detailed article after article on page after page of her journal.
She and her family had just returned to London from visiting Paris for Easter. They yet had plans to travel to New York for the summer social season. Would the season continue without Mr. John Jacob Astor (Astor was the richest passenger aboard the RMS Titanic and was thought to be among the richest people in the world at that time), who Lucie knew and had dinner with on occasion? Or other members of New York society that Lucie and her family may have known? How can anyone trust ship-travel after such a tragedy?
Maybe there was some comfort in collecting these revealing reports, but we can only speculate about her motives for cutting and pasting current events. What is obvious is that she did not want to forget.
Scroll through the slides below to see more of Lucie's newspaper clippings, and invite from John Jacob Astor.
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