She gave Black Beauty the reins
Lisa Sabbage

More than 125 years after it was published, Black Beauty continues to entertain and enlighten children everywhere. But who was the author of this enduring novel and why did she write it?

YOU can always pick out the children who have read Black Beauty. When they’re not cantering about the playground, tossing back their hair and making neighing noises, they’re piping up in the classroom about the environment and being kind to animals.

More than 125 years after her first and last novel was published, Anna Sewell would be gladdened to see that her only book is still having such an impact on children and their worldview.

Born on March 30, 1820, in the English town of Yarmouth, Sewell was the daughter of a Quaker family who was plagued by illness throughout her life and poured her imagination and her religious faith into a story that was part fiction, part autobiography.

In the early 19th century when Anna was growing up, animals were considered beasts of burden to be put to work by their human masters.

Horses were particularly badly treated. Underfed and badly treated, they were sent down mines or used to haul barges and overloaded carts in rain, sleet or snow. They often died of exhaustion or the beatings their cruel owners gave them.

Even carriage horses suffered, and Sewell was appalled by fashionable practices such as docking, or shortening the tail, which not only caused the horse pain, but also left it vulnerable to insect bites and stings.

"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel," wrote Sewell, "but they do not suffer less because they have no words."

For Anna, there was also another more personal reason for her passion for horses. In 1834, at the age of 14, she slipped and twisted her leg. The injury refused to heal and marked the start of a mysterious illness — possibly the auto-immune disease, lupus — which lasted the rest of her life and often caused her so much pain that she could not leave her bed.

Forced to walk with a crutch, the only time Anna could experience freedom again was when she was riding a horse. She became amazingly skilled with horses, and could usually control them with her voice alone. She drove with a loose rein and never used a whip, often talking to them like old friends.

For Anna, Black Beauty was her equine alter ego. Like him, she was used to bearing her pain in silence.

Finally, in her 50s, confined to her house by her illness and told that she had only 18 months to live, Anna Sewell decided that she wanted to write a book that would alleviate suffering and "induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses."

Giving the animals the voice that had so long been denied to them — the title page declared the book was "translated from the original Equine" — she wrote about all the abuses she had witnessed humans inflicting upon their animal servants.

With Beauty as her narrator and main protagonist, she charted his life from birth to retirement, showing that animals do indeed feel pain, and that good and bad treatment does affect the quality of their lives.

The book was innovative in humanising animals by giving Beauty a first-person voice. Yet Sewell’s publishers did not expect it do well, and London booksellers bought just 100 copies on its publication. After all, in 1877 when it was printed, Anna was an unknown spinster and a chronic invalid.

However, in the next 15 years Black Beauty sold more than a million copies and helped to change public opinion around the world.

Sadly, Sewell did not live to see her words wield their power. She died on April 25, 1878, just four months after Black Beauty was published.

"If we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt," she wrote."

More than a century later, it is a philosophy that continues to shape hearts and minds everywhere. — Asia Features