.jpg)
A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters
History of A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters
History of A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters
A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters published in 1871 was Lady Barker’s third published book.40 It was written following the success of Station Life in New Zealand which had shown that Lady Barker had both the talent to write, and an audience that would make her career as a writer successful.41 At the time (the late 1860s) there were not a great deal of original books written for children, with most children’s books and stories being republished versions of classic fairy tales.42 Children’s literature is often considered to have an intended audience that is distinctly different from the author as an adult;43 Lady Barker differs from this in that she wrote stories for children that she herself would be interested in reading.44 Lady Barker’s sons George and Jack shared their mothers desire for well-written exciting tales, and with her blossoming success as a published writer she set about to write the sort of stories they desired herself.45 The first result of her foray into children’s literature was the book Stories About.46 Published in 1870, Stories About exemplifies Lady Barker’s innovative method of seamlessly intertwining fact with fiction – it featured tales rooted in truth, but fictionalized for children and included tales of animals that paved the way for later famous stories about animals for children such as Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and Beatrix Potter’s tales.47 Lady Barker believed that writing for children should be a combination of non-fiction and fiction, and that it should be written simply and conversationally, a style that she continued to use in A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters.48 A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters is a collection of four tales linked together by a central narrative of a woman telling stories to a group of children during Christmastime. The central narrative is likely based on a combination of Lady Barker’s first Christmas back in England after living in New Zealand when she was reunited with her sons Jack and George, and other previous Christmases and times when her children had asked her for stories of her adventures and travels.49 She even includes her sons by name and description in the central story, describing “chubby-cheeked Georgie, who was dreadfully matter-of-fact, and acted as a check on all flights of imagination” and Jack who had “tastes for what he called the ‘grim and grisly’” (7-8). These descriptions were based on her actual sons different desires in their stories, and the four tales of A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters are divided according to these desires.50 The first tale of “Christmas Day in England” is a ghostly story clearly included for those children who, like Jack, wanted the “grim and grisly” while the tales of Christmas Days in Jamaica, India, and New Zealand are far more factual and do not include a supernatural elements such as ghosts, but instead focus more on cultural traditions and the people involved in them.
with the beginning of the later Little House in the Big Woods by Ingalls Wilder which starts withOnce upon a time there was a lady who liked telling stories to children, and once upon a time – which time exists up to this very moment – there were a great many children who liked listening. This lady used to be constantly surrounded by boys and girls in a chronic state of story-hunger; but fortunately she never seemed to tire of telling all that they wanted to hear. (3)
Likewise similar in language and style is Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn, which beginsOnce Upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs. The great dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods.53
Each of these novels is in the style favoured by Lady Barker, they clearly tell the children from the beginning what the book is going to be about, and though each of these books is technically fiction, they narrated as if they are fact and the content of each is actually based on the life events of the author (or of the author’s grandmother in the case of Caddie Woodlawn55). While Lady Barker was not the only author of her time to employ this style of writing for children, she was certainly recognized as an important part in a shift in the way in which books were written for children.56In 1864 Caddie Woodlawn was eleven, and as wild a tomboy as ever ran the woods of western Wisconsin. She was the despair of her mother and of her elder sister, Clara. But her father watched her with a shine of pride in his eyes, and her brothers accepted her as one of themselves without a question.54