By Anna Sewell

Black Beauty:

This is one of the most famous children’s books ever written. Since its publication in 1877 it has sold well over 30 million copies. It held the world record for sales far and above any other piece of children’s literature for one hundred and thirty years, until the year 1997 when a certain novel named Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published.

It wasn’t however written for children - the story of the highly spirited and gorgeous black stallion and his transfer from owner to increasingly abusive owner until his final happy rescue, was originally intended to be a campaigning work distributed to those who worked with horses in the middle of the nineteenth century. But there was something about the story which led to its becoming one of the most successful pieces of children’s literature ever written.

The great success of Black Beauty was partly due to the novelty of telling the story from the horse’s point of view, unheard of in 1877 when horses were not even supposed to have points of view. The clarity, simplicity and energy of that voice is still astonishing but more astonishing in the 1870s was the public reaction to the book, this gentle Quaker woman used the voice of a strong, black horse to undermine most of the assumptions of working Victorian Britain.

In the first place it led fairly directly to a sea change in thinking about the treatment of animals - almost immediately leading to the banning of what was known as the Bearing Rein, a painful and restrictive piece of the bridle which held a horse’s head at what was deemed to be a fetching angle but which ultimately crippled it. But on a wider context it led to a major discussion of the welfare of animals and the rights of the oppressed in general. In her gentle and indirect way, Sewell attacked all the assumptions of Victorian working Britain. She used the language of slavery to tell what was essentially a story of ownership and abuse, she even went as far as to lay the blame not at the feet of those that abused but at the owners who let the abuse happen. Alongside all this Sewell tells a brilliantly gripping story with a deeply attractive hero, and it is this that led Black Beauty into the record books and this classic of children’s literature into an unrivalled place in the consciousness of six generations of children.