Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 22

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Popular Culture Review
.. .his guide, with whom familiarity with the proletarians had, in a great
measure, bred indifference, hurried him away to Little Bourke Street,
where the narrowness of the street, with the high buildings on each
side, the dim light o f the sparsely scattered gas lamps, and the few
ragged-looking figures slouching along, formed a strong contrast to
the brilliant and crowded scene they had just left. Turning off Little
Burke Street, the detective led the way down a dark lane...Kilsip turning
to the left, led the barrister down another still narrower lane, the
darkness and gloom of which made the lawyer shudder, as he wondered
how human beings could live in them. (Hume 100)

Racist images of the “stolid Oriental” who “glides soft footed” through the
alleyways, together with the horror of the (white) drunken prostitute, complete the
scene that is compared to Dante’s inferno and the “valley of the shadow o f death”
(Hume 100-101). Sax Rhomer’s “Fu-Manchu” novels repeat the themes of “the
Fall” into the urban dystopia of “chinatown.” The hero again descends into the
darkness o f Chinatown:
The mantle o f dusk had closed about the squalid activity of the East
End streets as we neared our destination. Aliens of every shade of
colour were in the glare of the lamps upon the main road about us now,
emerging from burrow-like alleys. In the short space of the drive we
had passed from the bright world o f the West into th