Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell.
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10 Facts About Black Beauty
2.
Black Beauty said that her purpose in writing the novel was "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 entitled "Essay on Animals".
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4.
Story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by the titular horse named Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm with his mother, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country.
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5.
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 behavior lending the novel a good deal of verisimilitude.
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6.
Black Beauty is considered to be one of the first fictional animal autobiographies.
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7.
Tess Coslett highlights that Black Beauty's story is structured in a way that makes him similar to those he serves.
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8.
The depiction of the "bearing rein" in Black Beauty spurred so much outrage and empathy from readers that its use was not only abolished in Victorian England, but public interest in anti-cruelty legislation in the United States grew significantly.
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9.
The arguably detrimental social practices concerning the use of horses in Black Beauty inspired the development of legislation in various states that would condemn such abusive behaviors towards animals.
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10.
Black Beauty was adapted for the stage in 2011 by playwright James Stone.
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