The Real East End , livre ebook

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98 pages

English

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This classic work, originally published in 1932, is now being republished with a new introductory biography. Thomas Burke, born in Clapham, London in 1886, considered himself a true Londoner and the large majority of his writings are on the subject of everyday life in London. We are republishing this classic work with a new biographical introduction.

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Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	17 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528765619
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE REAL EAST END
The Text by
THOMAS BURKE
The Lithographs by
PEARL BINDER
Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Thomas Burke
Thomas Burke was born in Clapham, London in 1886. His father died when he was very young, and at the age of ten he was removed to a home for middle-class boys who were respectably descended but without adequate means to their support. Burke published his first piece of writing - a short story entitled The Bellamy Diamonds - in 1901, when he was just fifteen. However, proper recognition came in 1916, with the publication of Limehouse Nights , a collection of melodramatic short stories set amongst the immigrant population of London s Chinatown. Limehouse Nights was serialized in three British periodicals, The English Review, Colour and The New Witness , and received positive attention from reviewers and a number of authors, including H. G. Wells. It also sparked something of a controversy, however, and was initially banned by libraries due to the scandalous interracial relationships it portrayed between Chinese men and white women.
It was these portrayals of London s Chinatown that Burke is best-remembered for. However, there is some degree of confusion over how much of Burke s writing was based in fact; as literary critic Anne Witchard states, 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. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that, in his day, Burke was regarded as the foremost chronicler of London s Chinatown at the turn-of-the-century. Burke told newspaper journalists 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, and these journalists almost uniformly took him at his word.
Burke continued to use descriptions of urban London life as a focus of his writing throughout his life. Off the back of Limehouse Nights , Burke published the thematically similar Twinkletoes in 1918, and More Limehouse Nights in 1921. However, he was a prolific author who tried his hand at a number of different genres. He semi-regularly published essays on the London environment, including pieces such as The Real East End and London in My Times , and during the thirties even tried his hand at horror fiction. Indeed, in 1949, shortly after his death, Burke s short story The Hands of Ottermole was voted the best mystery of all time by critics. Burke also influenced the burgeoning film industry in Hollywood; D W Griffith, for example, used the short story The Chink and the Child from Limehouse Nights (1917) as basis for his silent movie, Broken Blossoms (1919), and Charlie Chaplin derived A Dog s Life (1918) from the same book.
WATNEY STREET MARKET
BOOKS BY THOMAS BURKE
CITY OF ENCOUNTERS
THE FLOWER OF LIFE
THE SUN IN SPLENDOUR
PLEASANTRIES OF OLD QUONG
THE WIND AND THE RAIN
LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS
THE ENGLISH INN
NIGHTS IN TOWN
THE BOOK OF THE INN
CONTENTS
ITS COLOUR
ITS PEOPLE
ITS RIVER
ITS COMMERCE
TAIL-PIECE
ILLUSTRATIONS
WATNEY STREET MARKET
MIDNIGHT IN LIMEHOUSE CAUSEWAY
SPREAD EAGLE YARD, 1931 ( from my studio window )
SPREAD EAGLE YARD, 1932
ALDGATE, EVENING
JEWISH BURIAL GROUND, BRADY STREET
JEWISH BOOKSHOP IN WENTWORTH STREET
WEST INDIA DOCK ROAD
BLACKWALL TUNNEL
ALDERMAN S STEPS, WAPPING
VAULTS ( London Docks )
THE CIRCUS, ALDGATE ( by the Tower )
ST. KATHERINE S WAY, WAPPING
BRICK LANE, BEGEL-SELLER
JEWISH RESTAURANT IN BRICK LANE
MY LANDLORD, SPREAD EAGLE YARD
ITS COLOUR
EAST END! . . . Visions in the public mind of slums, vice, crime, sin, and unnameable horrors.
East End! . . . Dregs of humanity. Beggars and thieves. Bare-footed waifs. Outcasts. Drunkards. Jack the Ripper. Crimping dens. Dangerous streets. Policemen walk in twos and threes. Something worse than Chicago. Sidney Street. Limehouse. Opium dens.
East End! . . . Hooligans. Diseased harlots. Public-houses at every corner. Thugs lurking in every alley. Sudden death.
Well, legends are like old soldiers. But old soldiers do eventually fade away, and that is more than legends do. Fact, set beside legend, is a poor, pale thing, apathetic and incompetent to hold its own. Facts fade away and die, but legends are invulnerable and immortal; and the East End legend, I suppose, will last as long as there is any East End. Because the East End did misbehave itself in the forties and fifties of last century, the decent and kindly East End of the twentieth must go on paying for misbehaviour with which it was never concerned. The People are like that; they will cherish their traditions against all truth and all disproof. They will speak of singers as great singers long after the singers voices have gone to rags. They will applaud once-fine actors who have lost all ability to act. If a man has once had a term of prison he is for ever after an ex-convict. If a man is once charged with a crime and proved innocent, he is remembered for ever as the man who was charged with-- They love labels and will keep their faith in them long after the print of the label has faded. They will give a politician a good name, or a dog a bad name, and no matter what politician or dog may afterwards do, the label is never changed. So with the East End. They have fastened on the legend and ignored the fact; and if my own early books have had anything to do with nourishing the legend among them, I make no apology. It is their own fault, as I have said elsewhere, for taking imaginative Arabian Nights fictions as though they were newspaper-reporting. I admit to using the East End for my own purposes, and dramatizing it to what I wanted it to be, as many authors have done before and since with the territories of their choice.
The public s muddled notions on the social life of the East End are accompanied by equally muddled notions on its topography, and even on its location. Many people think that the whole of the East End consists in a district called Limehouse. To a still larger number it means, topographically, any part of London east of a line drawn from Islington to Camberwell, and, sociologically, any quarter where the poor live. You have only to say to these people slums and poor and Communism, and they think at once East End. They do not know that Vauxhall, Camden Town, North Kensington and Battersea are much more truly representative of what they think they mean by the term. Even the Press often goes astray in the matter. My friend, Ernest George, who wrote that moving play, Down Our Street , keeps a bookshop in Hackney. Every press paragraph that I have seen about him states that he keeps a bookshop in the East End. In the nineties Arthur Morrison published his Tales of Mean Streets , the scene of most of the tales being Hoxton. That book is still described as a book of East End stories. Some time ago I published a tale the scenes of which were Clerkenwell and Kingsland Road. That, too, was reviewed as a tale of East End life.
In truth, the East End is as definite a quarter as the West End. Hammersmith and Notting Hill are West but they are no part of the West End, nor are Edgware Road, or Bayswater, or Paddington, though they are more West than any part of the West End. The East End, then, is only one part of that half of the metropolis which is called East London. The East End itself is the vast Metropolitan Borough of Stepney. That borough begins at Aldgate Pump and ends at Poplar, with Bethnal Green as its northern boundary and the river as its southern. Within its lines you have all those districts which compose the East End, and their names are Aldgate, Whitechapel (the Ghetto), Spitalfields, Ratcliff, Shadwell, Wapping, Mile End and Limehouse; the Tower Hamlets, in short. This is the true East End, and these are the names which, to the uninformed ear, still carry an odour of misery and evil. But it is, as I say, an odour only, with no substantial source. The East End of Blanchard Jerrold and Dor and James Greenwood perished in their lifetime, and many courts and alleys near the City border, which once were nests of hovels and the haunts of desperadoes, now hold the solid buildings of commerce and industry. Warehouses, wholesale shops, factories, and the offices of small businesses may be found occupying the houses that once were crimping dens and gambling dives. The great god Business has accomplished in a few strokes all those reforms which the philanthropic groups spend many years and tons of other people s money in talking about. If you think you will find here any fruity samples of what is called low life, I recommend you to look elsewhere-to look off City Road and around the minor streets of certain Midland and Northern and Scottish towns.
None the less, the East End is dramatic. It is peculiarly rich in atmospheres and in variety of human types. It is as respectable as Brixton, but it is not Brixton. It is as well-clothed as Pimlico, but it is not Pimlico. It is right on the edge of the City; in fact, the City merges into it; but it is not affected by the City. Independent of each other and without warfare, the bleak, brittle life of the City marches with the warm, casual life of the East End. London has many souls, and the East End is its dramatized soul, for it is built of all nations. Its townscapes, if not pleasing, are affecting. All have quick lines of character, for so