Title: Introduction [to A Christmas Cake In Four Quarters]

Author: Ashlee Nelson

In: A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters

Publication details: Frederick Warne and Company, 1887, London

Part of: Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection

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The Four Quarters of the Cake: India

Strictly speaking, India would not have been the next country chronologically in which Lady Barker spent a Christmas after Jamaica, having returned to England after marrying Captain Barker before deciding to accompany him on his military postings overseas. However it makes sense in the context of the structure of including four tales of different cultures and locations to describe it next as she had already given a tale to an English Christmas. Moreover as the narrator in the book she had promised the children of the tale stories of her Christmases abroad in faraway lands, and in particular New Zealand, Jamaica, and India (9-10).

Furthermore, India in particular had a significant, if tragic, part in Lady Barker’s personal history as the location of the death of her first husband Captain George Barker. This is reflected in the distinctly dark story of the uprising of some of the native Indians against the English in one of the tales within the tale in this quarter (195-223). As with the other Christmases of the book however she couches her sense of bereavement and loss in these darker and more melancholy tales with a more cheerful and frivolous tale at the end – in this case the story of the near mishap of the sailor who did not know the proper signals for “all quiet” and nearly got himself attacked by his own crew (226-235).

Lady Barker’s style of including the serious and sombre alongside the cheerful and silly is perhaps why the book was so well received by the public and critics alike of her time,⁶³ and why it appealed to both adults (and was included in several adult anthologies⁶⁴) as well as the children for whom it was written. Additionally at a time when the English Empire was so globally expanded, A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters would have provided to those back in England who did not have the will and drive to travel the globe that Lady Barker had, a sense of how their countrymen abroad lived and celebrated Christmas, and how, as she writes herself in “Christmas Day in India” “if it was not made up of the usual pleasant routine of the English festival, it had, at all events, its own share of adventure and excitement.” (235).