SOURCE: An introduction to Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke, Horizon Press, 1973, pp. 12-19.

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955), Contemporaries (1962), and On Native Ground (1942). In the following essay, he discusses the strengths and limitations of Limehouse Nights.

Thomas Burke believed that Limehouse, the great grimy port area on the north bank of the Thames, was the most exotic place in the world. When I saw it one day in 1945, wandering about the East India docks, I seemed to see nothing but the most enormous warehouses solidly lining the streets back of the docks. What I remember of that late Saturday afternoon under a cloud of war is pale London urchins playing indecipherable London games in what looked, even in daylight, like some impenetrable shadow cast upon the streets from the warehouses bristling at a stranger from street...