ABSTRACT
The excitement aroused by Nights in Town: A London Autobiography came from its merging of two genres, travelogue and autobiography, encouraging the erroneous assumption that its author actually ‘lived the kind of grim life’ chronicled in its pages.2 Nights in Town brought Burke critical acclaim for its originality in combining ‘frankness’ with a lyrical prose style.3 With the publication of Limehouse Nights, he achieved notoriety, although as the American critic, Christopher Morley wryly observed, Limehouse Nights was ‘less satisfactory to those who had read the first book’ being ‘largely a repetition of the same material in fiction form.’4 In his introduction to Burke’s contribution to the 1921 anthology, Modern Essays, Morley writes: ‘Mr Burke holds what must be a record among authors’ for working over ‘nearly the identical substance’ again and again. By this time Burke had followed up Limehouse Nights with Twinkletoes: A Tale of Chinatown (1917), a collection of verse, The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse (1920), and more Limehouse stories, Whispering Windows: Tales of the Waterside (1921). He was now regarded as the laureate of London’s Chinatown, a literary cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic.
