her passengers and crew as well as the treatment of her passengers as she sank into the sea embodies the view of social classes in the Edwardian Era.
Walter Lord notes that passenger accommodation aboard Titanic was a microcosm of the Edwardian world because it illuminated the then-prevailing class distinctions (Lord 17). The accommodations were spread among the top seven decks and were strictly segregated according to class. The most affluent were housed on the upper levels, and Tibballs notes that, generally, a descent into the bowels of the liner equated with a descent on the social ladder (Tibballs 36).
First class carried more than 300 passengers whose names included American industrial barons and their families such as Astor, Guggenheim, Straus and Widener (Geller 13). Second class passengers were the middle class, a growing proportion of the population in Europe and the United States created by the Industrial Revolution with its greater distribution of wealth and diversification of labor (Geller 90). Third class, or steerage, was filled with the lower, working classes many of whom were non-English speaking immigrants going to America in search of a better life (Geller 1
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