Black Beauty: Encyclopedia - Black Beauty

Black Beauty

Black Beauty (in full: Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, first published November 24th 1877) is Anna Sewell's first and only novel, composed in the last years of her life between 1871 and 1877 while confined to her house as an invalid.

The story is told in the "first person" (or first horse) as an autobiographical memoir told by a highbred horse named Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country. Along the way, he meets with many hardships and recounts many tales of cruelty and kindness. Each short chapter recounts an incident in Black Beauty's life containing a lesson or moral typically related to the kindness, sympathy, and understanding treatment of horses, while Sewell's detailed observations and extensive descriptions of horse behaviour lend the novel a good deal of verisimilitude.

The book became an immediate best-seller, with Anna living just long enough (five months) to see her first and only novel become a success. Anna said of her purpose in writing "its special aim being 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. 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 abolishing the cruel practice of using the checkrein (a strap used to keep horses' heads high, fashionable in Victorian England but painful and damaging to their necks).

Crippled and unable to walk since a young child, Anna's exposure to horses began early in life when she spent many hours driving her father to and from the station from which commuted to work. Sewell's introduction to writing began in her youth when she helped edit the works of her mother Mary Wright Sewell—a deeply religious, popular author of juvenile best-sellers. By telling the story of a horse's life of in the form of an autobiography and describing the world through the eyes of the horse, Anna Sewell broke new literary ground.

Black Beauty was not originally intended a children's novel, but for people who work with horses. It soon, however, became a children's classic, a novel of education for generations of schoolchildren to the present day. While it outwardly teaches animal welfare it also contains allegorical lessons about how to treat people with kindness, sympathy and respect. Later editions would sometimes include questions highlighting the moral purpose of each chapter.

There have been over 400 discrete editions of Black Beauty published, and it is one of the most widely read novels in English.

Black Beauty - Film adaptations

The book has been adapted into film and television several times, including:

• Black Beauty (1946) at the Internet Movie Database
• Black Beauty (1971) at the Internet Movie Database
• The Adventures of Black Beauty (TV series) (1972) at the Internet Movie Database
• Black Beauty (1994) at the Internet Movie Database

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Black Beauty", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki