Nights in London (Dodo Press)

Thomas Burke (1886-1945) was a British author. He was born in Eltham, London. His first successful publication was Limehouse Nights (1916), a collection of stories centred on life in the poverty-stricken Limehouse district of London. Many of Burke's books feature the Chinese character Quong Lee as narrator. The Lamplit Hour, an incidental poem from Limehouse Nights, was set to music in the United States by John Penn in 1919. That same year, American film director D. W. Griffith used another tale from the collection, The Chink and the Child as the basis of his screenplay for the movie Broken Blossoms. Griffith based his film Dream Street (1921) on a Burke novel. His other works include: Verses (1910), Pavements and Pastures (1912), Twinkletoes: A Tale of Chinatown (1917), Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse (1920), The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels (1922), The Wind and the Rain (1924), The Sun in Splendour (1926), East of Mansion House (1926), The Book of the Inn (1927), Essays (1928), The Flower of Life (1929), The Bloomsbury Wonder (1929) and City of Encounters (1932).