Abstract
This chapter examines Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) in the context of the 1870s. It argues that in her only novel Sewell expressed the experiences and beliefs of her life, broke literary gender barriers by focusing on working horses, and wrote with acute topicality on equine concerns when Britain’s demand for horsepower was at its height and various forms of equine cruelty were pervasive. As Gavin shows, Black Beauty also drew on the sensual techniques of sensation fiction, but to starkly realist and didactic ends, in creating the empathetic bond readers have with Sewell’s equine protagonist. Through ‘“writing the life of a horse,”’ Sewell produced more than an equine autobiography. She also powerfully reminded readers that horses had lives and were not machines; they were living beings worthy of kindness and care.
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Notes
- 1.
Probably because of the authenticity of its narrative voice Black Beauty has continued to speak to women readers on an inexplicable level. Many women remember it from childhood as both beloved and almost unbearably sad. ‘In many ways,’ Coral Lansbury observes, ‘Black Beauty has always been a woman’s book, and … its effect upon adolescent girls has always been one of unbearable anguish. Generally read at the perilously emotional time when a child crosses the threshold to adult life, Black Beauty is a work of inconsolable grief. It is read obsessively, as though it contained lessons which must be learned, no matter how painful’ (97). Black Beauty ‘remains in the mind like a buried landscape’ (Lansbury 64). Pony novelist Josephine Pullein-Thompson similarly recalls: ‘As soon as I could read,’ ‘I had devoured Black Beauty eight times, sobbing over Ginger and the hardness of human life’ (79), while author Jane Smiley writes:
When I first read Black Beauty at age ten. … What I got was what every reader of Black Beauty gets: an experience of almost uncanny empathy that went so deep into my memory that even now, after fifty years, I almost cannot read Anna Sewell’s novel or think of it without tearing up … the power of this book remains with me. (x–xi)
- 2.
In 1875 major horse owners in London included the London General Omnibus Company (8000 horses), Pickford & Company carriers and railway agents (900), Thomas Tilling (Jobmaster, carrier, omnibuses 750), Great Northern Railway (720), Great Eastern Railway (500), livery stables, brewers, jobmasters, carriers, and cab proprietors (cited in Turvey 39).
- 3.
Flower, to whom Sewell sent a copy of her book, greatly admired Black Beauty, and two illustrations from Flower’s Bits and Bearing Reins showing the horse’s pain ‘with the bearing rein’ and greater comfort ‘without the bearing rein’ were added to many British editions of Black Beauty from the 1880s till the end of the nineteenth century.
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Gavin, A.E. (2020). ‘I am writing the life of a horse’: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty in the 1870s. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 2. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 2. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38528-6_16
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