SOURCE: "Burke of Limehouse," in The Bookman, New York, Vol. XLVI, September, 1917, pp. 15-17.

In the following essay, Bronner evaluates the style and themes of Limehouse Nights and London Lamps.

Violent times seem to beget in those who stay quietly at home a taste for a brutally realistic literature. After the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, when the Czar crushed the rebels with an iron hand and all Russia seemed once more sunk in hopeless and helpless despair, there was an unprecedented production of novels and stories whose realism was unusually frank, even for that country. Strangely enough, it was also pornographic. It was as if by mutual consent of writers and reading public they had said, "Very well, if we cannot have political freedom we will have freedom in our novels. Nay we will go beyond freedom. We will have license."

In Great Britain to-day, confronted always by...