Black Beauty

Black Beauty narrates his own life from a colt's earliest memories on a gentle English farm, through a long series of owners, some kind, some carelessly cruel, whose treatment of him Sewell renders in exact, unsentimental detail. Squire Gordon and later the London cab driver Jerry Barker handle him decently, feeding, resting, and speaking to him as though his comfort mattered, while other owners work him past reasonable limits or strap his head into the fashionable bearing rein, a device Beauty describes from direct physical experience as agony rather than as an abstraction the reader is simply told to condemn. His years pulling a London cab wear him down further still, and he eventually falls into the hands of Nicholas Skinner, whose overwork very nearly finishes him, before a final change of ownership restores him to easier work and, at the very end, to a peaceful retirement with three kind ladies whose young groom turns out to be Joe Green, who cared for him in his happier years, knows him at once, and sees him treated well for whatever time he has left.

Sewell wrote the book almost entirely as an argument, using Beauty's plain, matter of fact voice to make a case for basic decency toward working animals that she felt no essay could make as effectively as a horse telling his own story. It reads quickly and simply, closer to a series of connected episodes than a single plot, and its emotional force comes less from incident than from the horse's own steady, uncomplaining tone, which makes every instance of casual cruelty land harder for a young reader than outrage ever could.

Sewell wrote it while bedridden with a long illness in the last years of her life and died only five months after its publication, having lived just long enough to see it begin to sell.