ABSTRACT
With Nights In Town: A London Autobiography (1915), a collection of personal vignettes of London by night, Thomas Burke, a working-class journalist and passionate Londoner would confuse the familiar theme of the Yellow Peril by ‘writing back’ from Limehouse. Despite, or because of, the marginalisation of the late-Victorian cults of Aestheticism and dandyism, there was a discernible continuity of that Decadent aesthetic that fostered a narcoticised sensibility and revelled in urban modernity as a realm of exquisite artifice. The very un-English lifestyle that revolved around recreational drug use marked an ideological break with Victorian convention and can be seen as a precursor to the drug sub-culture of the first decades of the twentieth century: ‘We want you to take us one night to visit the particular Chinky who seems so obliging’ Austin Harrison, then editing The English Review, wrote excitedly to Burke in 1915.2
During the years of the Great War, London’s nightlife was hectic. Burke wrote afterwards, that if Robert Louis Stevenson had been there to witness it, he ‘could have placed it in it a New Arabian Night which would have topped all the others in his stories of the extravagant and bizarre’.3 Some 30 years before, Stevenson’s collection of stories, New Arabian Nights (1882), had conjured an Orientalised fairy-tale of London’s landscape after dark. During the War, as Burke recalled, London was indeed ‘a changeling … All outdoor lamps were painted blue, and all shop and house lights thickly screened. All public-houses were shut at half-past nine.’4 Burke’s suggestive picture of the blue-lit London of the period chimes very well with the Orientalised landscape of London that had completely captured the popular imagination at the turn-of-the-century. Now, only the lights of theatres and music-halls glimmered through the ‘blue mist’ after ten.5 While Chu Chin Chow provided ‘a glamorous escape … Entertainment and distraction of other
Loring & Mussey, 1935), p. 126.
