Thomas Burke

Thomas Burke (29 November 1886 – 22 September 1945) was a British author.

He was born in Clapham Junction, London.

Burke was born Sydney Thomas Burke on 29 November 1886 in Clapham Junction.

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 "[r]espectably 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.

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.

His first successful publication was Limehouse Nights (1916), a collection of stories centred on life in the poverty-stricken Limehouse 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.

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 [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.

Burke continued to develop his descriptions of London life throughout his later literary works.

Griffith based his film Dream Street (1921) on Burke's "Gina of Chinatown" and "Song of the Lamp".

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 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 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.

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.

Even negative reviews tend to be tempered by acknowledgement for Burke's craft.

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 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.

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".