SOURCE: “Quakers and Bakers,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 7, 1997, p. 40.

In the following review, Kynaston offers a mixed assessment of Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin, noting that the work contains “a reasonable amount of business matter, all sensibly deployed.”

Two years ago, Margaret Forster published Hidden Lives, a justly acclaimed account of the Carlisle-based lives of her grandmother, her mother and her early self. A mixture of history and memoir, it deserves to become a classic. Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin, also set in Carlisle, is implicitly a companion volume.

In essence, it tells the story of Carr & Co, bakers and biscuit manufacturers, between 1831 and 1931. The dominant figure, during and after his life, was Jonathan Dodgson Carr, born in 1806 into a Kendal family that ran a wholesale grocery business. The Carrs, like many of their neighbours, were Quakers, and Forster relates with sympathy, as well as insight, how...