style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">It is 100 years since the Titanic went down. Even as it happened, there were those who felt it was a metaphor for the end of the Victorian age. The great, self-confident ship, with its rigid social classifications, was clearly an emblem of the Britain that had sent the ship forth in April 1912. GK Chesterton, in The Illustrated London News, saw “our whole civilisation” as being “very like the Titanic” ... “There was no sort of sane proportion between the extent of the provision for luxury and levity, and the extent of the provision for need and desperation. The scheme did far too much for prosperity and far too little for distress – just like the modern State.”