Just as writers before her sought to expose abuses against the working class, Anna Sewell, in her enduring children’s novel Black Beauty, exposed abuses against animals. Although ostensibly written for children ages nine through twelve, adults also loved the book.

Had it appeared decades earlier, it might not have attracted as much notice or had the reforming effect on animal treatment that resulted from its publication at the end of the 19th century, when audiences were more open to reformation in the area of animal rights. As some of the thesis novels of the mid-19th century hoped to elucidate harsh working conditions for humans, Sewell wanted to do the same for work animals.

In one of the most celebrated juvenile novels ever published, she tracks the fate of Black Beauty, who is also the narrator in this anthropomorphological tale. While he begins well, in the care of a loving mother and an attentive owner, his life declines into a nightmare of overwork, beatings, and injuries inflicted by fashionable riding and driving equipment.

In part due to Sewell’s efforts, the painful “bearing rein” that forced horses’ heads into an unnatural position, which curtailed their breathing and caused extreme neck discomfort, went out of use shortly after the novel’s publication. It also inspired the founding of societies for the prevention of animal cruelty and the enforcement of laws to curtail animal abuses.

The novel makes its grisly point by introducing readers to a mare named Ginger, whose early mistreatment sours her disposition. She tells Beauty her story and becomes a tragic figure later in the book when she dies from abuse. Sewell fashions a memorable and wrenching final scene between Ginger and Beauty when he finds her near death on the streets of London. Her once-great spirit broken, she tells her old friend, “[M]en are strongest, and if they are cruel and have no feeling, there is nothing that we can do, but just bear it—bear it on and on to the end. I wish the end was come, I wish I was dead.” Moments later, her wish is fulfilled as Beauty sees her lifeless body driven away in a cart.

Beauty’s story is only slightly better, although it does have the requisite happy conclusion for a children’s book. He barely survives his overwork and lack of nourishment while pulling cabs in London; when he becomes too weak to pull a cab, he is placed in a sale of broken and ill horses. Fortunately, a young man from a kind family urges his grandfather to purchase Beauty, and the horse begins recovery. A former groom recognizes Beauty, and he is allowed to live out his life in a loving home, serving his masters with a ride or by occasionally pulling a cart.

Another prominent animal character early in the book is Merrylegs, a pony that young readers find endearing, as do the children in the story who he looks upon as his charges.

Sewell uses her venue to attack additional forms of animal abuse and unethical behavior. Early in the novel, Beauty witnesses a rabbit hunt in which dogs are injured, a rabbit nearly torn to bits, and a man killed in a fall from a horse named Rob Roy, who Beauty later discovers to be his half brother. The horse must be shot, as his injuries cannot be treated.

Later, a drunken driver loses control of his brewer’s dray after urging his draft horses to move too quickly through a crowded street. The dray runs over a young girl, and a horse named Captain, pulling a nearby cab, is stabbed in the side with the dray’s splintered shaft. Sewell, a Quaker, makes a stand against drunkenness, as Beauty tells his readers, “If there’s one devil that I should like to see in the bottomless pit more than another, it’s the drink devil.”

While these disagreeable scenes remain vivid and pointed, Sewell takes care not to demonize all humans, and she profiles the poverty among humans in London as one cause of animal abuse. The novel inspired various film versions and remains popular, more than a century after its first printing, in both book and electronic text form.

Bibliography
Stevens, Gloria. Anna Sewell and Black Beauty. New York: Longmans, 1957.

Categories: British Literature, Children's Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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