Black Beauty by Anna Sewell: book review

Black Beauty (1877, this edition 2011) is a classic Young Adults book, set in England in the 19th century. However, originally the author, Anna Sewell (1820-1878), wrote the story as an adult novel.

Black Beauty is a horse and the narrator of his story. Throughout his life he has many owners, all with different behaviours and attitudes towards animals. Black Beauty, therefore, experiences love, pain, cruelty, compassion, wealth, poverty, servitude, freedom, good times, and bad times.

The novel – a horse autobiography – has a range of characters, both human and horse. The horses – Ginger, Merrylegs, etc. – are all intelligent and compassionate, with a gamut of feelings, whereas the humans are less so.

The chapters are short and moralistic. Written as a campaign for better treatment for horses and other animals, Sewell gets directly to the point in easy-to-read, curt language. Ginger describes the physical pain of bearing rein to Black Beauty: it ‘hurt my tongue and my jaw and the blood from my tongue covered the froth that kept flying from my lips.’

It is both an uplifting and delightful story, and a dark and depressing story. Sewell does not gloss over animal cruelty – in fact, that is the entire premise of the novel: victimization, human brutality, and animal dependency on humans. Re-reading, it is not for the faint-hearted child or adult, yet everyone should read it, at least once in their lifetime.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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