Thomas Burke (author) - Biographical Inaccuracies

Biographical Inaccuracies

Any attempt to accurately describe Thomas Burke’s life is severely complicated by the many fictionalized 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 yet contain far more invention than truth.” 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 romanticized 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 autobiogaphies attest to his supposedly intimate knowledge of lower-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 sub-cultural ‘Others.’