BURKE, Thomas.

£20,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Limehouse Nights: First edition, first impression, presentation copy from the author to the publisher, inscribed on the front free endpaper, "To Grant Richards, novelist and patron of letters. Thomas Burke". Examples in the jacket are rare and we have been unable to trace another inscribed copy. Queen's Quorum describes Limehouse Nights, a collection of 14 short stories, as "a work of high literary art [that] became a classic overnight"; for Grant Richards it was "a critical and financial success despite... risqué allusions" (ODNB). These "risqué allusions" are remarked on by Paul Newland in his study The Cultural Construction of London's East End: "Burke's Limehouse tales also echo the 'Yellow Peril' discourse of the fin de siecle. They re-engage with anxieties concerning urban degeneration, immorality, imperial decline, miscegenation and the increased political and sexual freedom of women. A number of commentators found Burke's tales brutally realistic, sexually explicit and dangerously immoral. But others found his work poetically charged, and argued that it featured wonderful descriptive passages that appealed to all the senses" (pp. 111-12). Grant Richards himself gives an engaging account of Burke delivering "a sheaf of typewritten manuscript" to his office and at home asking his wife to read one of the stories: "when she was so engaged she was usually deaf to interruption. But - but she was crying. Tears were coursing down her cheeks... When she had finished she turned

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