A Year of Horse Books: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell - reviewed by Katherine Roberts

This month, we take a look at a classic novel you've probably heard of even if you aren't a horsey person and don't normally read books with ponies on the front cover! Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.

Being pony mad, and with Black Beauty accepted as a children's story at the time, I read this book when I was about 10 years old. I can remember enjoying it as a story written from a horse's viewpoint, although not much else of the plot stayed with me over the years. I don't even remember what the cover looked like, only that it was a library book like most of my reading back then, so it was probably a hardcover edition. Weirdly, I've never actually owned a copy of this book, so I picked up a paperback edition from a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye to re-read with adult eyes for this review.

First published in 1877, the story follows Black Beauty's life from a foal in the meadow with his mother, through good times and bad, as he travels from Hampshire to Bath, and finally to London. Being well-bred with a sweet and willing temperament, he starts out living in relative luxury as a riding and carriage horse at a big house in the countryside, where he is looked after kindly by his grooms along with a spicy chestnut mare called Ginger and a children's pony called Merrylegs. But after an accident leaves him permanently scarred with 'broken knees' due to injuring them in a fall caused by a drunken rider, Beauty is deemed unsuitable for fancy carriage work and is sold on. He spends his later years as a jobbing cab horse in London, providing taxi rides six days a week for the citizens, where he witnesses outright cruelty with some of the cab drivers forced to work their horses literally to death in order to provide for their families.

Anna Sewell wrote this story to highlight the fate of working horses in her time. She has much to say about the fashion that required a carriage horse's head to be strapped high with a 'bearing rein', making it painful and difficult for the horse to pull a load, especially uphill. There is even a scene in the book where an unnamed lady criticises a driver for strapping his horse's head up too tightly, which I imagine could be based on Anna herself. During his working life, Black Beauty encounters a variety of grooms and owners, from the good to the bad to the ignorant, and although he is spared outright cruelty himself, he witnesses other horses suffering terribly. I distinctly remember the horrors of the bearing rein from my childhood reading, and I also remember crying over poor Ginger (who fought her masters and paid for it with her life). I don't really remember the various human characters Beauty meets along the way, but there is every shade of humanity in the story, all of them perfectly recognisable today - though, thankfully, these days horses are no longer part of our transport system, and so the drunks and boy racers of our time are more likely to be driving motors than horse-drawn vehicles.

Part of what makes this book so powerful today is that the training and care of horses has not changed very much since the days of Xenophon in Ancient Greece. All the things that Black Beauty and his friends experience at the hands of the men and women who own and care for them could just as easily happen to a horse today. One thing I've only just noticed this time around is that nearly all of Beauty's grooms and masters have names beginning with 'J'... James, Joe, Jerry, Jake, and at one stage even Beauty himself is renamed 'Jack' by his new owners... was this a deliberate nod, maybe, to someone Anna Sewell knew?

First edition (Jarrold and Sons, 1877)

Black Beauty is now available in so many editions and covers that it's difficult to pick a favourite. The first edition published in 1877 is routinely offered for thousands of pounds. So is it a children's book? It is often promoted as one today, presumably because of its animal hero, and yet despite the semi-happy ending for Beauty I am not sure it really is a book for younger readers... I can remember feeling quite sad after reading it, aged 10, and I know I missed some of the deeper themes. I suppose it's possible the edition I read in the children's library was abridged for a younger readership, as I have zero memory of some of the chapters in my more recent paperback, but it was a long time ago and I was mostly just interested in the horse characters back then. Originally published for adults, it's the kind of book that can be read on many levels and thoroughly deserves its classic status.

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Katherine Roberts writes fantasy and historical fiction for young readers, often featuring horses or their magical cousins such as unicorns.

Inspired by her childhood reading of 'Black Beauty', Katherine wrote I am the Great Horse to tell the story of Alexander the Great from the point of view of his faithful warhorse, Bucephalas. This novel was originally published by Scholastic US/Chicken House on a children's list, but has since been read by all generations of horse and history lovers.

I am the Great Horse

If you'd like to read a sample, the first three 'hoofprints' (chapters) of the full novel are now available as a free ebook under the title Prince of Macedonia. (age 10+)

Prince of Macedonia
* free ebook *