Black Beauty Study Guide

Anna Sewell was born the oldest of two children in a devout Quaker family. Her mother, Mary Wright Sewell, was a successful children’s book author, and she educated her children at home due to the family’s tight finances. The family moved around several times in Sewell’s youth, and Sewell finally got to attend school at age 14 when the family moved to Stoke Newington. However, at about this time, Sewell slipped and seriously injured both her ankles—injuries that necessitated a crutch for the rest of her life. This led her to rely heavily on horse-drawn transportation, as walking any distance was impossible for her. In turn, this contributed to Sewell’s love of horses and sparked her interest in animal welfare. Beginning in Sewell’s mid-twenties, her family moved to southern England, hoping the weather would improve her health. Sewell and her mother left the Society of Friends. After joining the Church of England, Sewell helped her mother edit a number of evangelical children’s books. Sewell and her mother were also involved in campaigns for temperance and abolishing slavery. As Sewell got older, her health continued to decline. She sought treatment in continental Europe but eventually became bedridden in a Norwich village called Old Catton. There, with her mother’s help, Sewell wrote Black Beauty, her only published work, over a period of six years. She sold her novel for meager 40 pounds, and it became an immediate bestseller. Sewell died five months after Black Beauty was published, so she never got to see her novel become one of the bestselling English-language children’s books of all time (though she didn’t write it for children). The house in Old Catton where she wrote Black Beauty is now called the Anna Sewell House.

Black Beauty was published nine years before the car was invented in 1886. During the Victorian era, people’s only options for transportation were walking, steam trains, or horses—either riding a horse or driving a horse-drawn vehicle of some sort. Because of this, horses were subject to some of the same kind of things that cars are today. Black Beauty mentions horse dealers and horse character referrals (much like someone buying a car today would purchase one from a dealer and look at the car’s service and accident history before purchasing), as well as the whims of fashion. The notorious bearing rein—which Black Beauty helped make unfashionable—can be seen as something analogous to a lift kit or a fancy hood ornament, though one that did significant damage to the horse. Bearing reins, which are known as checkreins today, go from the top of the horse’s head and connect to a piece of the harness on the horse’s back. It holds the horse’s head in an unnaturally high position, and as Black Beauty explains in the novel, it keeps a horse from using their whole body to pull a load (horses can pull most effectively when they can put their head and neck forward and down, which the bearing rein prevents). Black Beauty also explores how economic conditions in Victorian England essentially made it necessary to abuse and overwork cab horses, while also hurting cab drivers. In most editions of Black Beauty (including the one used in this LitChart), Sewell includes a footnote explaining that during the six years she was writing, the cab licensing system changed for the better. When she began, six-day cab licenses (which disallowed working on Sundays) and seven-day cab licenses were exorbitantly expensive and fares were kept low, meaning that drivers had to overwork their horses in order to make a profit. And until working horses were replaced by cars, working horses in major cities had an average life expectancy of only three years.

Black Beauty is considered the precursor to a genre of literature known as pony books, or books targeted toward young (mostly female) readers that are about horses, ponies, and horse care. Enid Bagnold’s classic standalone novel National Velvet is often considered a pony book, though many pony books are part of various long-running series, such as Jeanne Betancourt’s Pony Pals series or Bonnie Bryant’s The Saddle Club. It was also one of the first animal autobiographies. Today, there are a number of fictional books “written” by all sorts of animals, from the dog narrators of Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain and Jack London’s White Fang to the various animal narrators in Ceridwen Dovey’s short story collection Only the Animals. Black Beauty was also hugely influential in promoting animal rights and welfare, and it directly inspired Margaret Marshall Saunders’s novel Beautiful Joe, which is about the welfare of domestic dogs. Some critics have compared Black Beauty to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the most important social problem novels. It concerns the horrors of slavery in the U.S. and is often credited with helping to fuel the abolitionist cause in the 19th century.