Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse is an 1877 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.
Although Black Beauty is looked at as a children’s novel, Sewell did not write the novel for children. She said that her purpose in writing the novel was “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 (1802–1876) entitled “Essay on Animals”. 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 the abolition of 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). Black Beauty also mentions the use of blinkers on horses, concluding that this use is likely to cause accidents at night due to interference with “the full use of” a horse’s ability to “see much better in the dark than men can.”
Black Beauty is considered to be one of the first fictional animal autobiographies. Originally meant to be informative literature read by adults on the norms of horse cruelty and preventions of these unjust acts, Black Beauty is now seen as a children’s book. A novel narrated by the main character, Black Beauty is now read by thousands of kids worldwide.
Picture Credit : Google
