Thomas Burke (author)
[8] However, Limehouse Nights also proved controversial upon release, being "banned for immorality by the circulating libraries and Burke [being] condemned as a "blatant agitator" by the Times Literary Supplement 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.
[10] 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.
[12] 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 [and] yet contain far more invention than truth".
[5] 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.
[13] 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.
"[citation needed] 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 life.
[14] 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.
Critic Gilbert Seldes, 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.
[17] Unlike Rudyard Kipling, who wrote at the height of empire in distant India, 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.
"[2][21] 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 (1919).
Charlie Chaplin 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, Tully Marshall, Gladys Brockwell, Lucien Littlefield, and Warner Oland, directed by Charles Brabin.
[23] Scholars have also analysed how the depiction of the Chinese immigrant community in Limehouse Nights related to the Yellow Peril, a racial colour-metaphor for East Asians which posed them as a fundamental threat to the Western world.
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.
[29] Quong Lee, portrayed a tea-shop owner in Down East Limehouse, makes a brief cameo in the first volume of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he delivers the protagonists veiled hints about the "Devil Doctor's" machinations.
