Black Beauty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Author | Anna Sewell |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Jarrold & Sons |
| Released | 24 November 1877 |
- For other uses, see Black Beauty (disambiguation).
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.<ref name="Webster">Marriam-Webster (1995). "Black Beauty". Marriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature.</ref>
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, with Sewell's detailed observations and extensive descriptions of horse behaviour lending the novel a good deal of verisimilitude.<ref name="Webster"/>
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"<ref name="Webster"/>—an influence she attributed to an essay on animals she read earlier by Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) entitled "Essay on Animals".<ref>Gentle Heart: The Story of Anna Sewell, by Jen Longshaw.</ref> 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 (or "bearing rein", a strap used to keep horses' heads high, fashionable in Victorian England but painful and damaging to a horse's neck).<ref name="Hastings">Anna Sewell, by Prof. Waller Hastings, Northern State University, 2004. Archive.org copy.</ref>
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 he commuted to work. Sewell's introduction to writing began in her youth when she helped edit the works of her mother, Mary Wright Sewell (1797-1884), a deeply religious, popular author of juvenile best-sellers. By telling the story of a horse's life in the form of an autobiography and describing the world through the eyes of the horse, Anna Sewell broke new literary ground.<ref name="Hastings"/>
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 outwardly teaching animal welfare, it also contains allegorical lessons about how to treat people with kindness, sympathy and respect. Later student editions included further study questions, highlighting the moral theme of each chapter.<ref>For example see the John C. Winston Co 1927 edition.</ref>
Margaret Blount's Animal Land calls Black Beauty “the first real animal novel,” “the most famous and best-loved animal book of all time,” and “perhaps the last of the moral tales” (249-50). Susan Chitty calls it “probably the most successful animal story ever written” with more than 30 million sold.<ref name="Hastings"/>
[edit] 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 film). See also Docs Keepin Time, the horse that stared as Black Beauty.
[edit] Notes
<references/>
[edit] Refences from other works
- Authors the Pullein-Thompson sisters wrote two sequels to the novel:Black Beauty's Kin and Black Beauty's Family.
- Spike Milligan wrote a parody of the novel called Black Beauty:According to Spike Milligan (1996).
[edit] External links
- Black Beauty, available freely at Project Gutenberg
- Black Beauty, Penguin Readers Fact Sheet.de:Black Beauty
