Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

First published: 1877; illustrated

Type of work: Moral tale

Themes: Animals

Time of work: The late nineteenth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Birtwick, Earlshall Park, Bath, and London, England

Principal Characters:

• Black Beauty, the title character and narrator of the story, a gelding
• Duchess, his mother
• Farmer Grey, Black Beauty’s breeder, from whom he received the best of care
• Squire Gordon, Black Beauty’s kindhearted first purchaser
• Joe Green, stableboy for Squire Gordon and later for the Misses Blomefield
• Ginger, an ill-tempered chestnut horse and friend of Black Beauty
• Merrylegs, Squire Gordon’s fat, good-natured pony
• Earl of W, the weak-willed second purchaser of Black Beauty
• Reuben Smith, the second-in-charge of the Earl of W’s stable, a man given to drink
• Jeremiah Barker, a compassionate, pious London cabdriver
• Nicholas Skinner, the mean-spirited owner of a set of cabs
• The Misses Blomefield, three gentle women who are Black Beauty’s last owners

The Story

Black Beauty is a tale of riches to rags and back again. Black Beauty, the narrator, enjoys the best of care for seven years, first at the hands of Farmer Grey, his breeder, and then with Squire Gordon. The squire’s wife becomes increasingly ill; one of the most exciting episodes in the book involves Black Beauty’s race to fetch the doctor for her. The horse saves her life but almost loses his own because Joe Green, the stableboy, does not treat him properly after the eighteen-mile gallop.

Eventually the squire’s wife becomes so ill that the family must move to a warmer climate, and Black Beauty is sold to the Earl of W. The estate is grander than Squire Gordon’s, but life is less pleasant because the earl’s wife insists on making her horses wear a bearing rein. This device keeps the horses’ heads fashionably high when they pull her carriage, but it hurts the animals and interferes with their driving uphill. Because the earl does not control his stablehands any more than he does his wife, the horses are not well looked after. Reuben Smith, one of the earl’s employees, tries to ride Black Beauty home; he has been drinking and so fails to notice that the horse has lost a shoe. Forced to gallop by his inebriated rider, Black Beauty stumbles, killing Reuben and savagely damaging his own knees.

The earl will not keep a horse with bruised knees, so he sells Black Beauty, who soon becomes the property of the London cabbie Jeremiah Barker. Barker is almost as good to his horses as was Squire Gordon, and though the work is hard, Beauty is happy. The horse’s fortunes change, however, when Barker catches cold one New Year’s Eve while waiting for a fare, and his shattered health forces him to give up his work. Beauty is sold first to a baker, whose foreman overworks the horse, and then to Nicholas Skinner, who mistreats the animal even more. Carrying a heavy load up Ludgate Hill, Black Beauty collapses. Barker sells him to Mr. Thoroughgood, whose excellent care restores the horse’s health. Thoroughgood then sells him to the Misses Blomefield, where Beauty recovers his old name and spirit.

Context

Critic Coleman O. Parsons has identified numerous precursors of Black Beauty. Animal fables by writers such as Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine had long been available. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) both present talking horses, and in 1843, Thomas Smith published The Life of a Fox Written by Himself. Black Beauty’s descent from pampered pet to overworked hack parallels the life of Honoria Green in a novel by Anna Sewell’s mother, Mary, Patience Hart (1862), while Ginger resembles Abigail in that work. As early as 1841, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) had attacked the bearing rein, and countless Victorian tracts addressed the abuses that Sewell treats. Yet, while Black Beauty was not the first animal story, it was the first novel narrated by its animal protagonist to enjoy wide popular appeal; it succeeded in reforming and entertaining where the RSPCA and Thomas Smith had not. Sewell’s book, not those earlier works, provided the model for the stories of Kenneth Graham, and Beatrix Potter, and the many similar children’s books that followed.

The novel itself continues to attract readers more than a century after its publication and has become one of the best sellers in the English language even though the world it describes, with its horse-drawn cabs, carriages, and carts, has vanished. In part, this popularity derives from the work’s style. An invalid for whom writing was a chore, Sewell pared her language to its most direct without talking down to her young audience. Her story moves quickly; few of the forty-nine chapters exceed five pages, and they include many exciting scenes, such as Black Beauty’s dramatic rescue from a burning stable or the race for the doctor. Characters are clearly delineated as good or bad, and the story resembles a fairy tale, complete with a happy ending. Some critics have condemned the book for its moralizing, its anthropomorphism, or what they see as its social snobbery. Yet so long as children—and adults, too—enjoy reading about the triumph of good over evil, so long as they love animals and well-told tales about them, they will continue to harness themselves to Black Beauty for a pleasant ride through the Victorian landscape.