Black Beauty

Name: Black Beauty
Rating: 3.833333333333333 (6 reviews)
Author: Russell Blake

by Russell Blake

3.8

(6 ratings)

Black #1233 pages2013

About this book

Black Beauty is a novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time. While forthrightly teaching animal welfare, it also teaches how to treat people with kindness, sympathy, and respect. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 58 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by the titular horse named Black Beauty-beginning with his carefree days as a colt on an English farm with his mother, 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 describes conditions among London horse-drawn taxicab drivers, including the financial hardship caused to them by high licence fees and low, legally fixed fares. A page footnote in some editions says that soon after the book was published, the difference between 6-day taxicab licences (not allowed to trade on Sundays) and 7-day taxicab licences (allowed to trade on Sundays) was abolished and the taxicab licence fee was much reduced.

Publication Details

Published: 2013
Pages: 233

About Russell Blake

"Anna Sewell was born in 1820 and died in 1878. She was lame from childhood and spent most of her life as a semi-invalid living at Brighton where her father had a position as a Bank Manager. Her mother wrote several moral tales in verse for children. Anna wrote only one book, Black Beauty, which was published 1877, and which sold over 100,000 copies in the first twenty years. It has been translated into French, Italian, German and has been described as 'one of themost successful animal stories ever written." (Biographical note from <i>"Black Beauty"</i>, Blackie & Son Ltd., Glasgow, ca 1950s.) ---------- **Mary and Anna Sewell** ---------- **By Diana Kennedy** ---------- > *This article was originally published in the August 2001 edition of Soul > Search, the journal of The Sole > Society.* Both Mary Sewell nee Wright and her daughter Anna were authors. Mary, less well known today was a popular author of juvenile best sellers, writing stories with titles such as “Mother’s Last Words”, “Our Father’s Care” and “Thy Poor Brother”. Mary was a deeply religious woman, with a sensitive and artistic nature, who was until 1835 a Quaker. She was also a member of the Anti-Slavery Association. Her daughter Anna was the author of the well known children’s classic ‘Black Beauty’, a fictional autobiography of a thoroughbred horse. Her aim in writing the book was to “induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses”. The book has a strong moral purpose and is said to have been instrumental in the abolition of the cruel practice of using the checkrein . The book was recommended by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Mary Wright was born 6th April 1797 at Sutton, Suffolk, the daughter of John Wright a gentleman farmer and Ann nee Holmes. Ann was the daughter of John Holmes of Tivetshall, Norfolk. Mary Wright married Isaac Sewell on 15th June 1819 at Lamas, Norfolk after a five year courtship. Isaac was the youngest of t