Thomas Burke & London Life

Of the many, now largely unread, early-twentieth-century English popular authors who wrote fictions of London life (figures such as Edwin Pugh, William Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs, or Herbert Jenkins), Thomas Burke achieved, courtesy of Hollywood and a penchant for cultural exoticism, the widest recognition outside England of them all. Limehouse Nights, his collection of stories about London's dockland Chinatown, in extent little more than a street or two (essentially Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields), was published in 1916. D. W. Griffith bought the film rights for £1000, and by 1919 had turned "The Chink and the Child," the opening story, into Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, a vehicle for Lillian Gish. Burke himself despised and resented what Griffith made of the story, not least because his own role as author was obscured beneath the credit given to Griffith: "I had always regarded this story as invented and told by me; and ... I was surprised when a certain skilled workman, called a producer, claimed it as his. I expressed this surprise in one or two quarters and was told not to be silly" (231).

Anne Veronica Witchard's wide-ranging study of the antecedents, cultural context, and nympholeptic characteristics of Burke's Limehouse fiction is structured into five somewhat loosely associated parts, an organisation dictated, one suspects, by the quantity of this book that has already appeared in the six articles whose material various editors are thanked for their permission to reprint. Part One offers a brief overview across the centuries of the West's appetite for chinoiserie, culminating in the suggestion that "[w]e might read chinoiserie ... as the forbidden passion, the irrepressible revenant of the Gothic" (19). This leads to an exploration of the specifically English version of this fascination in a section entitled "'The Lamp of Young Aladdin': English Chineseness, 1780-1900." While richly contextualized by Witchard in the troubled history of Anglo-Chinese relations, this is at core the story of the evolution of a pantomime archetype. Aladdin is every English child's earliest introduction to a debased embodiment of an idea of the oriental, located in a fantasy "topsy-turvy" (one of Witchard's favourite adjectives) world initially positioned uncertainly between the Arabic Middle-East that provided the ur-text and the cursorily sketched-in China that provided the setting and characterization. By the time that Aladdin had become possessed of a mother named Widow Twankey (named, like other of the pantomime's characters, for a variety of Chinese tea), who runs a laundry in Peking, assisted by her other son Wishy Washy, the reduction of the "Chinaman" to the status of comic heathen, from which Burke is later seen as partially (but only very partially) rescuing him, is complete.

Part Three, "Inventing Chinatown," explores the creation towards the end of the nineteenth century of both the actuality and the literary idea of an East End Chinatown. De Quincey and Dickens are inevitable earlier reference points for what the reading public was encouraged to assume about the area, and the Dr. Fu Manchu stories of Burke's contemporary, Sax Rohmer, represent at its most reductive the racial stereotyping consequent on those assumptions. While Witchard's argument is admirably rooted in contemporary journalistic and political commentary on the area, it might have been strengthened (particularly in light of the tendency, amply demonstrated here, of Victorian commentators to see what prejudice and presupposition encourage them to see) by consideration of more recent work on the actual demographics of Limehouse: John Seed's substantial and important article "Limehouse Blues: Looking for 'Chinatown' in the London Docks, 1900-40" (History Workshop Journal, 62 [2006], 58-85) is conspicuous by its absence from Witchard's bibliography. The conclusion that "what makes Thomas Burke's Chinatown writing ... so fascinating is that he destabilises prevalent preconceptions in highly complex and contradictory ways" (116) offers promise of a rewarding opening up of Burke's fiction in the sections of this book...