Eleanor Widener’s Titanic Trauma
Eleanor Widener boarded Titanic with her husband George, a railway and streetcar company president who had been in England for business. Their adult son Harry had joined them on this trip. Harry, an avid bibliophile, researched and collected rare books. His interests led him to England in 1912, to buy books. He was particularly taken with the rare second edition of Bacon’s Essais published in 1598. When Titanic went down, so did her husband and son. The books her Harry so carefully selected, including Bacon’s book, followed them to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. Eleanor Widener escaped the doomed ship on lifeboat number four.