Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), fully titled Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, His Stableman, and His Mate, is a classic of children’s literature. But while its writing style is certainly child-friendly, Sewell actually wrote the novel with an adult audience in mind, and sought to influence public perceptions about animal welfare (or the lack thereof).
Learn how one author and a fictional horse have improved the lives of countless real-life farm animals.
In the Victorian era, before the development of the automobile industry, horses were seen as machines and used as such. In a 2012 NPR article, journalist Michelle Norris explains that “horse power was used for almost everything: war, agriculture, transportation, construction, factory work.” Horses were essential to maintaining daily life, and they were often worked beyond their limits, often in brutal ways.
Sewell’s 1877 novel portrays horses as living creatures, not machines to be used and abused. Black Beauty is told from the point of view of the ebony horse of the title, and the title page even reads, “Original equine translation by Anna Sewell.” It was a clever literary choice: by placing the reader in Black Beauty’s mind, they can walk a mile in his horseshoes and witness the suffering he endures. “Black Beauty helped people see animals in a new way,” author Jane Smiley, whose many horse-centered novels have been written, told NPR. “When you can tell an animal has a point of view, it becomes a lot harder to be cruel to it.”
Black Beauty is forced to do hard labor throughout the novel. / Culture Club/Getty Images
The novel is full of cruelty. Some people treat Black Beauty well, but others mistreat her. An aristocratic family forces Black Beauty to wear the fashionable bridle (also called an overcheck or check-rein) when pulling a carriage, forcing Black Beauty to hold her head unnaturally and painfully high. Later in the story, Black Beauty rides in a baker’s carriage, but the baker’s driver purposely overloads the carriage to reduce the number of trips the carriage makes.
Readers also learn of the terrible treatment of the horses Black Beauty befriends, such as Ginger, who is beaten and maimed, and the Captain, who witnesses atrocities as a war horse.
Sewell’s love of horses stemmed in large part from her own reliance on them: at age 14 she injured her ankle, which never healed properly, leaving her largely immobile and forcing her to rely on a horse-drawn carriage for transportation. She was especially fond of her family’s horse, Bess, who likely inspired Black Beauty a few years later.
However, Sewell did not begin writing Black Beauty until 1871, when she was 51 years old. In her diary, she wrote that her goal with the novel was “to awaken kindness, sympathy, and understanding towards horses.” This goal is made clear in the novel itself, with lines such as “We call horses dumb animals, and they are, because they cannot communicate their feelings to us; but the lack of speech does not lessen their suffering.”
Sewell also expressed hope for the novel’s impact in a letter to her friend Mary Bayley, who sent him a quotation from Horace Bushnell’s now out of print On Animals, which Sewell commented “stayed with me throughout the writing of the book, and above all made me feel that it was worthwhile to try to bring human ideas on this subject more into harmony with God’s purposes.”
Her book was an instant hit, and it wasn’t long before it began to change public perception about horse welfare: within a few years of publication, one million copies had been distributed in the U.S. Today, the book has sold over 50 million copies worldwide.
Black Beauty quickly gained support from animal rights activists, including brewery owner Edward Fordham Flower, who was a vocal opponent of horse reining, and George Angell, who distributed the novel to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Thousands of copies went into the hands of horse workers, from drivers to stablemen. The book not only hastened the decline of horse reining, but also helped to end the practice of unnecessarily clipping horses’ tails for cosmetic purposes.
A young black beauty and her mother. / Culture Club/Getty Images
The novel inspired a great deal of charitable work, inspiring a woman named Ann Lind to set up a charity in 1886. At the time it was called The Home of Rest for Horses, but in 2006 it was renamed The Horse Trust, with the aim of giving rest to taxi horses (and today, any kind of working horse in need).
Black Beauty continues to have an impact on animals today, with proceeds from the book raising funds to help horses. In 2017, Red Wings Horse Sanctuary, the UK’s largest horse charity, auctioned a rare 1915 edition, with the funds going towards feeding rescued horses. In 2023, Red Wings worked with the UEA Publishing Project to create a special edition of Black Beauty, with 50 percent of the proceeds going to charity.
Sadly, Sewell died just five months after the publication of Black Beauty, so she never got to see the profound impact her story had on the horses she was trying to help. But her literary legacy as an animal welfare advocate lives on. Bernard Untti, senior chief strategist for communications at the Humane Society of the United States, even called Black Beauty “the most influential anti-animal cruelty novel of all time.”
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