Title: A Christmas Cake In Four Quarters [annotated by Ashlee Nelson]

Author: Lady Barker

Publication details: Frederick Warne and Company, 1887, London

Part of: Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection

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“Christmas Books.” The Examiner, London. 16 Dec. 1871

Transcription of relevant section of “Christmas Books.” The Examiner, London. 16 Dec. 1871: par. 8.

“One of the best children’s books of the season is Lady Barker’s Christmas Cake in Four Quarters (Macmillan), which would have been noticed by us a week or two ago, had it not been stolen from our table and secreted in the nursery, there to be devoured at leisure, by a small critic, who found in it a solution of the old impossibility of eating a cake and having it too. This is Lady Barker’s best book. It gossips, in the pleasantest way possible, about the Christmas experiences, in England, Jamaica, India, and New Zealand, of a lady, who certainly must be the authoress, who “used to be constantly surrounded by boys and girls in a chronic state of story-hunger, but, who, fortunately, never seemed to tire of telling all that they wanted to hear.” The stories here told consist mainly of illustrations of emigrant and native customs in the colonies, and are all very interesting, and, save for an occasional touch of horror, very wholesome."