Thomas Burke (29 November 1886 – 22 September 1945) was a British author. He was born in
Clapham Junction
Clapham Junction is an urban locality around Clapham Junction railway station in London, England. Despite its name, it is not located in Clapham, but forms the commercial centre of Battersea.
Clapham Junction was a scene of disturbances durin ...
, London.
His first successful publication was ''
Limehouse Nights
''Limehouse Nights'' is a 1916 short story collection by the British writer Thomas Burke. The stories are set in and around the Chinatown that was then centred on Limehouse in the East End of London. The book was a popular success and features ...
'' (1916), a collection of stories centred on life in the poverty-stricken
Limehouse
Limehouse is a district in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in East London. It is east of Charing Cross, on the northern bank of the River Thames. Its proximity to the river has given it a strong maritime character, which it retains throug ...
district of London. Many of Burke's books feature the Chinese character Quong Lee as narrator.
"The Lamplit Hour", an incidental poem from ''Limehouse Nights'', was set to music in the United States by Arthur Penn in 1919. That same year, American film director
D. W. Griffith used another tale from the collection, "The Chink and the Child" as the basis of his screenplay for the movie ''
Broken Blossoms
''Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl'', often referred to simply as ''Broken Blossoms'', is a 1919 American silent drama film directed by D. W. Griffith. It was distributed by United Artists and premiered on May 13, 1919. It stars ...
''. Griffith based his film ''
Dream Street
Dream Street were an American pop music, pop boy band that was formed in 1999 by Louis Baldonieri and Brian Lukow. The band disbanded in 2002 following a legal dispute between parents of the band members and the band's managers.
History
The ...
'' (1921) on Burke's "Gina of Chinatown" and "Song of the Lamp".
Life
Burke was born Sydney Thomas Burke on 29 November 1886 in
Clapham Junction
Clapham Junction is an urban locality around Clapham Junction railway station in London, England. Despite its name, it is not located in Clapham, but forms the commercial centre of Battersea.
Clapham Junction was a scene of disturbances durin ...
.
Burke's father died when he was barely a few months old and he was eventually sent to live with his uncle in
Poplar.
At the age of ten he was removed to a home for middle-class boys who were "
spectably descended but without adequate means to their support." When Burke turned sixteen he started working as an office boy, a job that he deeply detested. In 1901, he published his first professional written work entitled "The Bellamy Diamonds" in the magazine ''Spare Moments''.
He also edited some anthologies of children's poetry that were published in 1910–1913.
![John Boydell - View of the riverside at Limehouse 1751](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/John_Boydell_-_View_of_the_riverside_at_Limehouse_1751.JPG)
In 1915, Burke published ''Nights in Town: A London Autobiography,'' which featured his descriptions of working-class London nightlife including the essay, 'A Chinese Night, Limehouse' However, it was not until the publication of ''Limehouse Nights'' in 1916 that he obtained any substantial acclaim as an author. This collection of melodramatic short stories, set in a lower-class environment populated by Chinese immigrants, was published in three British periodicals, ''The English Review'', ''Colour'' and ''The New Witness,'' and received marked attention from literary reviewers. ''Limehouse Nights'' helped to earn Burke a reputation as "the laureate of London's Chinatown".
Burke's writing also influenced contemporary popular forms of entertainment, such as the Western film industry. Indeed,
D. W. Griffith used the short story "The Chink and the Child" from ''Limehouse Nights'' as the basis for his popular silent film ''Broken Blossoms'' (1919). However, ''Limehouse Nights'' also proved controversial upon release, being "banned for immorality by the circulating libraries and Burke
eingcondemned as a "blatant agitator" by the ''
Times Literary Supplement
''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp.
History
The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to ''The Times'' but became a separate publication ...
'' for his evocative portrayal of a hybrid East End." The ''Times Literary Supplement'' wrote that
In place of the steady, equalised light which he should have thrown on that pestiferous spot off the West India Dock Road, he has been content... with flashes of limelight and fireworks.
Burke continued to develop his descriptions of London life throughout his later literary works. He gradually expanded his range with novels such as ''The Sun in Splendor'', which was published in 1926.
He also continued to publish essays on the London environment, including pieces such as "The Real East End" and "London in My Times".
Burke died in the Homeopathic Hospital in Queens Square,
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural, intellectual, and educational institutions.
Bloomsbury is home of the British Museum, the largest mus ...
on 22 September 1945. His short story "The Hands of Ottermole" was later voted the best mystery of all time by critics in 1949.
Having so closely tied his literature to Limehouse, illuminating an otherwise relatively unknown community, historians have noted that Burke's popularity correlated with the presence of the Chinese population in the district, leading to a significant decline in his notability in the decades following his death.
Biographical inaccuracies
Any attempt to accurately describe Thomas Burke's life is severely complicated by the many fictionalised accounts of his youth that circulated widely during his lifetime. Burke himself was principally responsible for fabricating and disseminating these autobiographical stories, which he used to bolster his authorial claim to an intimate knowledge of life among the lower-classes. As literary critic Anne Witchard notes, most of what we know about Burke's life is based on works that "purport to be autobiographical
ndyet contain far more invention than truth".
For instance, although he grew up in the suburbs, Thomas Burke claims in his autobiographical novel ''The Wind and the Rain: A Book of Confessions'' (1924) to have been born and raised in the East End, a lower-working class area of London. Furthermore, in this work he states that while growing up as an orphan in the
East End
The East End of London, often referred to within the London area simply as the East End, is the historic core of wider East London, east of the Roman and medieval walls of the City of London and north of the River Thames. It does not have uni ...
he befriended a Chinese shopkeeper named Quong Lee from whom he learned about Chinese life in London. Burke also told newspaper reporters that he had "sat at the feet of Chinese philosophers who kept opium dens to learn from the lips that could frame only broken English, the secrets, good and evil, of the mysterious East."
These romanticised tales of Burke's early life were often accepted by the literary critics of the day and went largely unchallenged by his contemporaries. Although Burke's later writing, including the book ''Son of London'' more accurately describes his youth in the suburbs, the majority of his autobiographies attest to his supposedly intimate knowledge of
working class
The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also " Designation of workers by collar colou ...
life. These fabricated autobiographies enabled Burke to establish his authority as an expert on the Chinese in London, allowing him to create a persona that he used to market his fictional works on Limehouse. As Witchard notes, Burke, through his writing, positioned himself as a "seer" in an "occult process" of representing London's Chinese immigrant community.
Critical reception
Burke's critical reception is as concentrated on ''Limehouse Nights'' as his public reception. Consensus is largely positive, praise coming from such notable authors as
H.G. Wells and
Arnold Bennett
Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English author, best known as a novelist. He wrote prolifically: between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboratio ...
.
Even negative reviews tend to be tempered by acknowledgement for Burke's craft. Critic
Gilbert Seldes
Gilbert Vivian Seldes (; January 3, 1893 – September 29, 1970) was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine ''The Dial'' and hosted the NBC television program '' The ...
, for instance, wrote:
"Possibly Mr. Burke's books, at once vigorous and wanton, may be respected afterward; one fears only that they will be found a little purposeless, a little lacking in social direction. It is that lack, of course, which makes them so attractive. For, it may be mentioned, these are wonderfully good things to read."
More ecstatic reviewers echo critic Milton Bronner's favourable comparison: "Not since the days when Kipling burst upon the English word has any writer displayed more sheer power and driving force". Unlike
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
...
, who wrote at the
height of empire in distant
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
, however, recent interpretation suggests Burke found critical success by writing about 'exotic' subject material at home, providing an escape for a public caught in the unprecedented brutality of World War I.
Reviews of Burke's many other works are more mixed, and always overshadowed by the controversial and successful ''Limehouse Nights''. ''Twinkletoes'', published a year later in 1918, rode on the same wave of approval. ''More Limehouse Nights'' in 1921 was also generally well received, but Burke was increasingly criticised for repetition. As critic John Gunther remarked, "
tmay be true that London is big enough to stand nine books about her from one hand. But that hand should be a bigger one than Thomas Burke's". While critical interest in Burke is now typically sparse, when recognised he is still regarded favourably as a
modernist
Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, an ...
author.
Burke's reception in the United States
Burke's work, particularly ''Limehouse Nights'', was extremely positive, with cinematographer
Karl Brown stating in his 1973 work ''Adventures With D. W. Griffith'' that: "The whole English-reading world knew every dark and dangerous alley of Limehouse as well as they knew the way to the corner grocery."
The American filmmaker
D. W. Griffith used Burke's short story "The Chink and the Child" from ''Limehouse Nights'' as basis for his silent film ''
Broken Blossoms
''Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl'', often referred to simply as ''Broken Blossoms'', is a 1919 American silent drama film directed by D. W. Griffith. It was distributed by United Artists and premiered on May 13, 1919. It stars ...
'' (1919). The film was equivalent in size, style, and prominence to a contemporary
blockbuster
Blockbuster or Block Buster may refer to:
*Blockbuster (entertainment) a term coined for an extremely successful movie, from which most other uses are derived.
Corporations
* Blockbuster (retailer), a defunct video and game rental chain
** Bl ...
. Griffith paid one thousand pounds for rights to the story, which was a huge sum at the time. This raised the public's awareness of the Limehouse district and the poverty in London. The film was
remade in 1936.
Other film adaptations have been based on Burke's stories as well.
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. (16 April 188925 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is consider ...
derived ''A Dog's Life'' (1918) from ''Limehouse Nights'', and Burke's book ''Twinkletoes'' (1926) was made into a movie of the same name, starring
Colleen Moore
Colleen Moore (born Kathleen Morrison; August 19, 1899 – January 25, 1988) was an American film actress who began her career during the silent film era. Moore became one of the most fashionable (and highly-paid) stars of the era and helped po ...
,
Tully Marshall
Tully Marshall (born William Phillips; April 10, 1864 – March 10, 1943) was an American character actor. He had nearly a quarter century of theatrical experience before his debut film appearance in 1914 which led to a film career spanning alm ...
,
Gladys Brockwell
Gladys Brockwell (née Lindeman; September 26, 1894 – July 2, 1929) was an American actress whose career began during the silent film era.
Early life and career
Brockwell was born Gladys Lindeman in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1894. ...
,
Lucien Littlefield
Lucien Littlefield (August 16, 1895 – June 4, 1960) was an American actor who achieved a long career from silent films to the television era. He was noted for his versatility, playing a wide range of roles and already portraying old men befor ...
, and
Warner Oland
Warner Oland (born Johan Verner Ölund; October 3, 1879 – August 6, 1938) was a Swedish-American actor. His career included time on Broadway and numerous film appearances. He is most remembered for playing several Chinese and Chinese-American ...
, directed by
Charles Brabin
Charles Brabin (April 17, 1882 – November 3, 1957) was a British-American film director.
Biography
Born in Liverpool, England, he was educated at St. Francis Xavier College. Brabin sailed to New York City in the early 1900s and, while hold ...
.
Maurice Elvey
Maurice Elvey (11 November 1887 – 28 August 1967) was one of the most prolific film directors in British history. He directed nearly 200 films between 1913 and 1957. During the silent film era he directed as many as twenty films per year. He a ...
's ''Curlytop'' (1924) combines a number of Limehouse scenes and other stories of Burke's were also used as material for ''
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
''Alfred Hitchcock Presents'' is an American television anthology series created, hosted and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, aired on CBS and NBC between 1955 and 1965. It features dramas, thrillers and mysteries. Between 1962 and 1965 it was ren ...
''. The 1949 British
spiv film
In the United Kingdom, the word spiv is slang for a type of petty criminal who deals in illicit, typically black market, goods. The word was particularly used during the Second World War and in the post-war period when many goods were rationed d ...
''
No Way Back'' is based on Burke's ''
Beryl and the Croucher "Beryl and the Croucher" is a short story by the British writer Thomas Burke which was part of his 1916 collection ''Limehouse Nights''. A washed-up boxer, known as "the Croucher" for his distinctive fighting style, having fought his last fight sin ...
''.
Literary works
Thomas Burke considered himself to be a true Londoner both by birth and in spirit, and the large majority of his writings are concerned with the everyday life in London. The settings and peoples of working class London became an important element in Burke's work, and lower class setting and character 'types' are repeatedly used in both his fictional and non-fictional essays. Burke's writing follows in the tradition of
James Greenwood and
Jack London
John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to ...
with his non-fiction, journalistic representation of London streets and the people in them. Burke gained recognition with his first book, ''Nights in Town'', in 1915. ''Limehouse Nights'' was his first popular success, though it was largely a repetition of the same material in ''Nights in Town'', only in fiction form.
Burke has in fact used the same material to produce different genres of writing—as essays in ''Nights Town: A London Autobiography'', as fictional short stories in ''Limehouse Nights'', as a novel in ''Twinkletoes'', and as poetry in ''The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse''. Though the majority of Burke's writing was concerned with London, and more specifically the East End and the Limehouse district, Burke also published several eclectic and "uncharacteristic" pieces. With ''Night-Pieces'' (1935) and ''Murder at Elstree or Mr. Thurtell and His Gig'', Burke tried his hand at horror fiction. In contrast to this, Burke also published ''The Beauty of England'' (1933) and ''The English Inn'' (1930), which depict England's countryside, and ''The Outer Circle'', which contains a series of ramblings about the London suburbs. In 1901 "The Bellamy Diamonds" was published in ''Spare Moments'' "which every week offered a guinea for the best short story sent in" (169).
Literary style and Yellow Peril
Burke's literary style blended several writing conventions to create a dramatic portrait of London. ''
Limehouse Nights
''Limehouse Nights'' is a 1916 short story collection by the British writer Thomas Burke. The stories are set in and around the Chinatown that was then centred on Limehouse in the East End of London. The book was a popular success and features ...
'' and its various sequels classified Burke as a "purveyor of melodramatic stories of lust and murder among London's lower classes".
Both his essays and fiction, focusing particularly on ''Limehouse Nights'', are characterised, seemingly paradoxically, with harsh realities and more romanticised, poetic outlooks. Ultimately, Burke's style is that of a blend of
realism
Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to:
In the arts
*Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts
Arts movements related to realism include:
*Classical Realism
*Literary realism, a move ...
and
romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
. Burke's first-hand knowledge (though overstated in his fictional autobiographies) and love for the city of London enabled Burke to write intimately about London life. Burke was also influenced by the work of
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Penson De Quincey (; 15 August 17858 December 1859) was an English writer, essayist, and literary critic, best known for his ''Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'' (1821). Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quince ...
, and many of his writings that focus on the Limehouse district bear a resemblance to De Quincey's ''
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
''Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'' (1821) is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. The ''Confessions'' was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one ...
''.
Scholars have also analysed how the depiction of the Chinese immigrant community in ''Limehouse Nights'' related to the
Yellow Peril
The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror and the Yellow Specter) is a racist, racial color terminology for race, color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East Asia, East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the Western world. As a ...
, a racial
colour-metaphor for
East Asian
East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The modern states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. China, North Korea, South Korea a ...
s which posed them as a fundamental threat to the
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and state (polity), states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania. . Scholar Anne Witchard argued that Burke's works displayed, in contrast to the majority of Western depictions of Chinese immigrants "what seems in the light of its day, and in contrast with
Sax Rohmer
Arthur Henry "Sarsfield" Ward (15 February 1883 – 1 June 1959), better known as Sax Rohmer, was an English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu."Rohmer, Sax" by Jack Adrian in Da ...
's
Fu Manchu
Dr. Fu Manchu () is a supervillain who was introduced in a series of novels by the English author Sax Rohmer beginning shortly before World War I and continuing for another forty years. The character featured in cinema, television, radio, comic ...
thrillers, an unusual racial tolerance", noting the "absence of moral censure regarding
miscegenation
Miscegenation ( ) is the interbreeding of people who are considered to be members of different races. The word, now usually considered pejorative, is derived from a combination of the Latin terms ''miscere'' ("to mix") and ''genus'' ("race") ...
" in ''Limehouse Nights''.
Nonfiction works
In addition to his autobiographical ''Nights in Town'', Thomas Burke wrote a non-fictional account of Chinatown in his book ''Out and About''. In the chapter entitled "Chinatown Revisited" Burke elaborates on a visit in 1919 to the Limehouse district. While there with a friend, Coburn, Burke discovers that the Limehouse he wrote about in ''Limehouse Nights'' has disappeared. He explains that the crime, sex, and violence characteristic of Limehouse has been regulated by the local police. No longer present was the life of the Chinese district that Burke had created. As he notes, "the glamorous shame of Chinatown has departed".
Thomas Burke's later nonfictional works, as analysed by Matt Houlbrook in ''Queer London'', examine, if only in an indirect way, London's homosexual communities. In 1922, Burke published ''The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels'', part of which describes the male homosexual relationship as existing within the public spaces of the city: "Only in the misty corners of the thickening streets…can
omosexual couplesattain the solitude they seek…For the young lover…the street is more private than the home."
In 1937, Burke published ''For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to all Londoners and London Visitors''. Burke's nonfictional account, according to Houlbrook, "offers an ironic—if heavily veiled—indictment of contemporary sexual mores", and again establishes public, rather than private spaces, particularly urinals, as the sites of homosexual desire. By providing a verbal and visual map of London with the locations of urinals clearly marked, Burke "
ormalizesmen's knowledge of these sexual possibilities" and "
odifiestheir knowledge of the tactics needed to use these sites safely". Burke's work as an urban observer thus allows him to map the public world of London's queer and to reflect upon the extent to which interaction with London's public landmarks engaged homosexual communities in an historical narrative of identity formation.
Bibliography
Secondary bibliography
*
R. Thurston Hopkins, "In the Footsteps of Thomas Burke", Chapter XIII of ''London Pilgrimages'' (London: Brentano's, 1928), pp. 193–210.
* Barry Milligan, ''Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture'' (Charlottesville & London: UP of Virginia, 1995).
* George A. Wade, "The Cockney John Chinaman", ''
The English Illustrated Magazine
''The English Illustrated Magazine'' was a monthly publication that ran for 359 issues between October 1883 and August 1913. Features included travel, topography, and a large amount of fiction and were contributed by writers such as Thomas Hardy, ...
'' (July 1900): 301–07.
* Anne Witchard, "Aspects of Literary Limehouse: Thomas Burke and the 'Glamorous Shame of Chinatown", ''Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London'', 2, 2 (September 2004): 7 pp. http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/september%202004/witchard.html.
Adaptations
''The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen''
Quong Lee, portrayed a tea-shop owner in Down East Limehouse, makes a brief cameo in the first volume of
Alan Moore
Alan Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English author known primarily for his work in comic books including ''Watchmen'', ''V for Vendetta'', ''The Ballad of Halo Jones'', ''Swamp Thing'', ''Batman:'' ''The Killing Joke'', and ''From Hell' ...
's ''
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
''The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'' (''LoEG'') is a comic book series (inspired by the 1960 British film ''The League of Gentlemen'') co-created by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill which began in 1999. The series spans four volum ...
'', where he delivers the protagonists veiled hints about the
"Devil Doctor's" machinations.
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
External links
*
*
*
Works by Thomas Burkeat Manybooks.net
'Thomas Burke' > 'Fiction' > 'English' > 'English Literature' (WorldCat.org)">'"Thomas Burke"' > 'Thomas Burke' > 'Fiction' > 'English' > 'English Literature' (WorldCat.org)*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Burke, Thomas
1886 births
1945 deaths
20th-century English poets
20th-century English male writers
English male poets
People from Poplar, London
The New Yorker people