Black Beauty
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- See also Black Beauty (disambiguation)
The story is told in the "first person" (or first horse) as an autobiographical memoir told by a highbred horse named Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country. Along the way, he meets with many hardships and recounts many tales of cruelty and kindness. Each short chapter recounts an incident in Black Beauty's life containing a lesson or moral typically related to the kindness, sympathy, and understanding treatment of horses, with Sewell's detailed observations and extensive descriptions of horse behaviour lending the novel a good deal of verisimilitude.
The book became an immediate best-seller, with Anna living just long enough (five months) to see her first and only novel become a success. Anna said of her purpose in writing "its special aim being to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses"—an influence she attributed to an essay on animals she read earlier by Horace Bushnell. Her sympathetic portrayal of the plight of working animals led to a vast outpouring of concern for animal welfare and is said to have been instrumental in abolishing the cruel practice of using the checkrein (or "bearing rein", a strap used to keep horses' heads high, fashionable in Victorian England but painful and damaging to a horse's neck).
Crippled and unable to walk since a young child, Anna's exposure to horses began early in life when she spent many hours driving her father to and from the station from which he commuted to work. Sewell's introduction to writing began in her youth when she helped edit the works of her mother, Mary Wright Sewell, a deeply religious, popular author of juvenile best-sellers. By telling the story of a horse's life in the form of an autobiography and describing the world through the eyes of the horse, Anna Sewell broke new literary ground.
Black Beauty was not originally intended a children's novel, but for people who work with horses. It soon, however, became a children's classic, a novel of education for generations of schoolchildren to the present day. While outwardly teaching animal welfare, it also contains allegorical lessons about how to treat people with kindness, sympathy and respect. Later student editions included further study questions, highlighting the moral theme of each chapter.
There have been over 400 discrete editions of Black Beauty published, and it is one of the most widely read novels in English.
Film adaptations
The book has been adapted into film and television several times, including:
External links
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