Black Beauty

One of the most striking features of Sewell’s novel is her use of an anthropomorphized horse as a protagonist. Readers experience the entire plot from Black Beauty’s point of view, and he narrates the novel in the retrospective first-person (using “I” and “my”, while looking back at events that have occurred in the past). For example, the novel begins with Black Beauty sharing his earliest memory: “The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow” (3). First-person narration typically creates a feeling of intimacy between readers and the narrator, as it gives access to a character’s inner world. The intimacy of first-person narration is important because Sewell’s central project is to create sympathy for how Black Beauty (and by extension, many other horses) suffer needlessly.

Sewell wants to help her readers overcome the sense that horses are simply animals, intended to be used solely for the benefit and convenience of humans, and that their suffering is not meaningful. By anthropomorphizing Black Beauty, and giving him access to language, and to the types of emotions and ideas that a human protagonist would have, it becomes much easier for a reader to feel sympathy. That sympathy in turn can lead to advocacy. This use of an anthropomorphized protagonist also explains why Anna Sewell chose to write a novel in order to fulfil her project of advocating for more humane treatment of horses. Advocating for the resolution of a social problem might be more typically addressed through writing a pamphlet or essay, giving speeches, or asking politicians to intervene in a cause. At the time that Sewell wrote her novel, other individuals had indeed used those means to advocate for more humane treatment of animals.

However, Sewell was also writing at a time when she had observed other novelists using their art form to draw attention to social problems; for example, authors like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell used many of their novels to draw attention to the suffering of impoverished and working-class characters. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) had also played a pivotal role in drawing increased attention to the outcry against slavery in the United States. In many of these novels, more privileged readers were able to see the perspective of, and feel sympathy for, characters whom they perceived as very different from themselves.

By drawing parallels between human and animals, Sewell builds on this technique. Horses were particularly accessible for this type of anthropomorphic treatment since they are highly intelligent and social, and (especially in Victorian times, when horse ownership would have been much more common), many individuals would have encountered and potentially bonded with horses at some point in their life. The original subtitle of the novel was “The Autobiography of a Horse” and included a playful note that it had been “Translated from the Original Equine” (referring to the idea that horses might have their own language).

Sewell structures her novel with similarities to the bildungsroman novel; this German term refers to a novel that closely follows the story of a single protagonist as they grow up, mature, and navigate the world, often exploring potential career paths and marriage prospects along the way. This genre was popular during the Victorian era, and famous novels such as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860) and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) can be considered examples of this genre. In classic bildungsroman fashion, Black Beauty begins with the birth and childhood of the protagonist. This structure creates opportunities to explore how early influences can be extremely important in shaping subsequent character and behaviors.

Throughout the novel, Black Beauty will be a noble and virtuous protagonist, and the discussion of his earliest days shows how his character was formed through the positive influence of his mother and his first owner. Throughout the plot, other characters will be able to assume, based on Black Beauty’s sweet and hard-working nature, that he had a gentle and loving experience as a young colt. Black Beauty recalls that “our master was a good, kind man […] he spoke as kindly to us as he did to his little children” (4). This quotation shows that as a young colt, Beauty received nurturing and positive reinforcement from both human and horse parental figures, and that this goodness helped to shape his subsequent character.

The exploration of Beauty’s early life conveys the idea that if people want horses to be docile and eager to please, they should focus on providing young colts with a caring foundation at the start of their life. This focus on the development of positive character may also help to explain why Black Beauty has largely become famous as a novel for children and young readers. Anna Sewell did not write with young readers as her intended audience: she wanted her novel to be read by individuals who owned and interacted with horses (most of whom would have been adult men) so that they might be inspired to treat their horses better. However, the appeal of an animal protagonist, as well as the clear moral lessons that Sewell conveys, have made the novel a popular choice for younger readers. For example, Black Beauty’s mother urges her son to “grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will” (4), and this advice is general enough to be applicable to both young horses and young children.

In addition to Black Beauty’s careful education, Sewell explores ideas of class and breeding in establishing his virtuous character. Victorian England was an extremely class-conscious society, and it was not uncommon for individuals to believe that members of the upper-classes were inherently more virtuous and noble, while viewing members of the working-class as inclined towards vice, laziness, and bad behavior. Part of why authors and advocates saw the need to “humanize” working-class characters through sympathetic portrayals was often to counter these stereotypes (although stereotypes of the upper-classes as selfish, cruel, and self-involved certainly existed as well, and appear later in the plot of Sewell’s novel). Among horses, “breeding” is quite literal, and refers to pedigree, genealogy, and physical traits; for example, Ginger and Beauty are quite physically distinct from Merrylegs, and can perform different tasks. As Black Beauty observes, “Ginger and I were not of the regular tall carriage-horse breed, we had more of the racing blood in us” (33), showing that for horses, breeding shapes their literal ability to be suited to different physical tasks.

However, because of Sewell’s anthropomorphizing, the notion of breeding in horses blurs into human notions of class and social distinction. In encouraging her son’s good behavior, Beauty’s mother explicitly reminds him that he needs to live up to his family legacy. She tells him that “you have been well-bred and well born” (4), and contrasts him with “carthorse colts” (3), implying that Beauty’s lineage and social position requires him to be held to a different standard of behavior.

Her own name, Duchess, explicitly references the idea of Beauty being well-bred and parallel to a human born into the upper-classes.

At the same time, while Black Beauty is a well-bred, and therefore valuable horse, his status as an animal lends itself to comparisons to servants, or even slavery. Much like a household servant, Beauty will have to strive to please and meet the expectations of his master, and the circumstances of his life will be largely dependent on his performance, as well as their generosity and goodwill. Beauty’s mother tells him that, “a horse never knows who may buy him, or who may drive him; it is all a chance for us” (12), showing that even relatively elite horses are completely at the mercy of human decisions. Servants at least have the option to choose their employers, and seek new work if they are unhappy; in their experience of being separated from their families, bought and sold, and lacking any control over who owns and purchases them, the experiences of horses in the novel most closely parallels the experience of enslaved people. When the novel was published in 1877, it had been less than a decade since slavery was abolished in the United States (1865). Some critics and scholars have suggested that Black Beauty’s experience of being bought and sold, as well as the choice to make her horse protagonist black, allowed Sewell to build on the popular outcry against slavery, and nudge her readers to consider whether their concern for human suffering could also apply to animals.

As is the case for many protagonists, as Black Beauty matures, he enters into the wider world and begins to encounter other characters who will contribute to shaping his point of view. Ginger is largely presented as a foil character to Black Beauty. Both her name and her physical attributes (a reddish colored coat) develop the notion of her as a fiery and hot-tempered character, in contrast to Beauty’s more placid and calm disposition. Merrylegs explains to Black Beauty immediately that, “Ginger has a bad habit of biting and snapping” (14), and while Merrylegs is referring to Ginger’s literal behavior, the qualifiers of “biting” and “snapping” also refer to how she tends to speak to others.

When Ginger reveals her own history, her experiences are juxtaposed against those of Beauty so as to further develop Sewell’s argument about the humane treatment of young horses. Whereas Beauty’s experiences and subsequent character show how positive influence create virtue, Ginger’s experiences show that a horse that is mistreated and abused is likely to become aggressive and unruly. Ginger reflects openly that “I wish I could think about things as you do; but I can’t after all I have gone through” (28). This quotation shows another way in which Sewell anthropomorphizes her horse characters: she gives them the ability to connect past events to present circumstances, and to experience regret, and an awareness of psychological development. This introduction to Ginger foreshadows the suffering she will endure throughout the rest of her life, and her ultimately tragic fate. It also introduces the theme of the Inherent Goodness of Animals, showing that Ginger only became aggressive after she was repeatedly abused and mistreated.

Sewell wrote Black Beauty with a strong agenda towards social change and reform, and some of her critiques become apparent very early in the novel. The beating and rough treatment that Ginger encounters reflects the reality that horses were sometimes treated as disposable, or as though they were incapable of experiencing pain and suffering. Sewell was also writing at a time when industrialization was quite far advanced in England, and people had become accustomed to relatively modern conveniences such as machinery and trains. The pace of life had also accelerated, and individuals increasingly held expectations of being entitled to speed, convenience, and control. These expectations, combined with the reality that horses still played a vital role in transporting people and goods from place to place, led to people sometimes becoming impatient and abusive towards horses who could not or would not perform the way that they were demanded to. As Merrylegs (usually a very patient and moderate character) complains, “boys, you see, think a pony is like a steam engine or a thrashing machine” (31). In this quotation, Sewell reveals the connection between increasing industrialization leading to unrealistic expectations, and subsequent mistreatment.

In addition to more general critiques of abuse and unkindness, Sewell isolates a few specific practices to challenge. The use of the “bearing-rein” had become popular because it was believed to provide greater control, but more so because many individuals liked the aesthetic of horses being paraded in public with heads held and locked artificially high. Discussion and critique of the bearing-rein becomes an important motif in the novel in part because Sewell can so effectively convey the physical pain it causes to horses, and because this device functioned almost entirely on aesthetic grounds, with no practical benefits. When a friend of Squire Gordon argues that he uses the bearing-rein because, “I like to see my horses hold their heads up” (41), the Squire counters that, “I don’t like to see them held up” (41), creating an implicit contrast between artifice and nature.

The popularity of the bearing-rein reveals how horses functioned as sites where an individual’s class and social position were displayed as they moved through the world; someone pulling up in a carriage used that carriage, and the horses who pulled it, to cultivate the image they wanted to present. However, unlike other objects that might subsequently come to function as the same signifiers (a fancy car, or designer clothes, for example), horses are living, breathing beings who are capable of suffering. The notion of cropping tails in horses, and the tails and ears of certain breed of dogs similarly focuses on maintaining arbitrary standards of appearance even at the cost of physical suffering. Sir Oliver angrily demands to know, “why don’t they cut their own children’s ears into points to make them look sharp?” (35), drawing a parallel between the vulnerability of children and animals that will be repeated a number of times in the novel.

Sir Oliver’s account is poignant because it seems that the fashion of cropping horse tails has passed away by the time he speaks to younger horses; for the sake of a short-lived fad, he was permanently marred and left to experience “a life-long wrong, and a life-long loss” (34). The pain and mutilation experienced by animals out of deference to arbitrary aesthetic standards may have been of particular interest to Anna Sewell, given that, as a woman, she would also have likely encountered how women’s bodies were modified in unnatural ways (for example, through wearing corsets) in order to meet social and aesthetic expectations.