Anna Sewell born 1820-1878

About:

Anna Sewell was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England, though the family moved to London shortly after her birth. Her parents were Quakers, and consequently were active in many of the liberal campaigns of the day. Their beliefs in the abolition of slavery, the education of the poor, the respect for nature and the fair treatment of all creatures were passed on to their daughter, who passed it directly onto mankind in her famous novel Black Beauty.

On her way back from school when a young girl, Sewell had a serious accident which smashed the bones of her ankles irreparably. Despite long sojourns in various European spas in attempts to heal her, Sewell was crippled for the rest of her life. She took to editing the immensely popular children’s literature written by her mother, one of whose works sold over a million copies, an astonishing feat in the mid-nineteenth century given a population of twenty million and the illiteracy of a large part of that population. At one point in her early twenties, her life was revolutionised by the purchase of a chaise and pony which gave her some degree of freedom. The trap and its little pony allowed her to drive herself about, and her father to and from the station to work. The provider of this burst of liberty did not go unnoticed and, in truly Quaker fashion, Sewell began to look around for ways to repay the debt she felt she owed the various pullers of her chaise.

She did not begin writing until 1870, at the age of fifty, when she became almost totally housebound. She returned to Norfolk with her mother and the two women began work on Black Beauty, her only novel, with the daughter dictating and writing short notes and the mother transcribing. Seven years later, in 1877, it was sold to a local publishers, Jarrold and Son for the meagre sum of £20. It was published months before her death, but its success was so swift and so vast that she was able to delight in the effect its success was beginning to have on the mistreatment of animals and horses in particular. In a moment of final irony, in Sewell’s funeral cortège, her mother noticed that all the horses were wearing the Bearing Rein, the restraining bridle part to which Sewell had objected so strongly in Black Beauty. Mary Sewell is reputed to have gone from horse to horse removing the reins, an action which was echoed not long after in the wider society when as a direct result of the popularity of Black Beauty, a long running campaign to ban the Bearing Rein was made law in what was to become one of the first pieces of animal rights legislation. It was a mark of the brilliance of the gentle urging behind her writing that it was not until much later on that the wider effect of Black Beauty would become clear. The gentle Quaker with a children’s story about the abuse and mistreatment of a black horse contributed enormously, long after her death to the swelling opinion calling for the abolition of slavery.