ABSTRACT
Limehouse Nights marks a significant point in the progression from the Victorian cult of the child as fetishised object of purity ‘caught before the contamination of adolescence’, to the new century’s fixation on the adolescent and her endless propensity for depravity.2 Burke’s Chinatown stories, while they had their antecedents in the metropolitan melodrama and their topicality in the news stories of the day, are not about unsuspecting parlour maids conned by fake advertisements nor ‘dazed Irish girls fresh off the steamships at the docks.’3 Few of them are naive victims while his Chinamen usually are. The heroines of Limehouse Nights bloom in the corrupt streets of a chinoiserie underworld. Thomas Burke imagined Limehouse as an anarchic playground, a theatre of the delinquent: ‘You might have seen her about the streets at all hours of day and night.’4
