Literary Works
Thomas Burke considered himself to be a true Londoner both by birth and in spirit, and the large majority of his writings are concerned with the everyday life in London. The settings and peoples of working class London became an important element in Burke’s work, and lower class setting and character ‘types’ are repeatedly used in both his fictional and non-fictional essays. Burke’s writing follows in the tradition of James Greenwood and Jack London with his non-fiction, journalistic representation of London streets and the people in them. Burke gained recognition with his first book, Nights In Town, in 1915. Limehouse Nights was his first popular success, though it was largely a repetition of the same material in Nights in Town, only in fiction form.
Burke has in fact used the same material to produce different genres of writing—as essays in Nights Town: A London Autobiography, as fictional short stories in Limehouse Nights, as a novel in Twinkletoes, and as poetry in The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse. Though the majority of Burke’s writing was concerned with London, and more specifically the East End and the Limehouse district, Burke also published several eclectic and “uncharacteristic” pieces. With Night-Pieces (1935) and Murder at Elstree or Mr. Thurtell and His Gig, Burke tried his hand at horror fiction. In contrast to this, Burke also published The Beauty of England (1933) and The English Inn (1930), which depict England’s countryside, and The Outer Circle, which contains a series of ramblings about the London suburbs. In 1901 “The Bellamy Diamonds” was published in Spare Moments “which every week offered a guinea for the best short story sent in” (169).
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