Black Beauty

About This Book

Black Beauty is the life story of a horse, told by the horse himself. It begins in a wide green meadow in the English countryside, where a handsome black colt grazes beside his mother and learns his first lessons about the world. His mother is a wise old mare who tells him that he comes from good stock and that the best thing a horse can do is work willingly, keep his temper, and never bite or kick. Those lessons matter more than the colt can guess, because a horse in Victorian England does not choose where he lives or who owns him. When the colt is old enough, he is trained to wear a saddle, a bridle, and a harness, and he is sold to a country estate called Birtwick Park. There he is given the name Black Beauty. He meets the other horses in the stable, learns the routines of the grooms and coachmen, and discovers that some people handle horses with patience while others do not. Every new home in his life brings new work, new stablemates, and new masters, and the difference between a kind hand and a careless one is something he feels in his own body. Anna Sewell wrote the book so that readers would understand what the animals working all around them actually experienced. There are no talking humans-turned-animals and no magic here; the horses simply describe their days to one another the way people describe theirs. Because Beauty tells the story in his own steady, thoughtful voice, readers see the Victorian world from an unusual height, looking out between a pair of blinkers at a society that depended on horses for almost everything.

Black Beauty asks a question that fifth graders are exactly the right age to wrestle with: what do we owe to a creature who cannot speak up for itself? The book gives readers a narrator who is patient, honest, and easy to care about, and it never lectures — it simply lets you watch what happens when someone is kind and what happens when someone is careless or cruel. Along the way it opens a window onto a vanished world where horses pulled every cab, cart, and carriage, which makes it a natural bridge into history as well as literature. It is also a wonderful book for practicing point of view, because every event arrives filtered through a narrator who understands some things about people and completely misunderstands others.

Pre-Reading Discussion Questions

1. What do you already know about how people used horses for travel and work before cars were invented?
2. If an animal could describe its day to you, what do you think it would notice that a person might miss?
3. What does it mean to treat an animal well? Is feeding it and housing it enough, or does kindness require something more?
4. Beauty's mother tells him that being good and gentle will serve him better than being fast or handsome. Do you agree that character matters more than talent?
5. Why might an author choose to tell a story through the eyes of a narrator who cannot speak to the humans around him?
6. What responsibilities do you think a person takes on when they own an animal that depends on them completely?

Themes & Big Ideas to Track

• Kindness and cruelty are usually shown through small, everyday choices rather than dramatic ones.
• A narrator who cannot speak the language of the people around him sees clearly but is powerless to explain himself.
• Ignorance can do as much harm as deliberate cruelty, and the book keeps asking whether that difference matters.
• A horse's life in this era is shaped entirely by who owns him, which links the animals' fortunes to the social class of their masters.
• Fashion and appearance are repeatedly set against comfort, health, and common sense.
• Good work, patiently done, is presented as something worth respecting in both animals and people.

Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide

About the Author

Anna Sewell was born in Norfolk, England, in 1820 into a Quaker family that believed strongly in kindness and social reform. As a teenager she injured both ankles in a fall, and for the rest of her life she had trouble walking, which meant she depended on horses and carriages to get anywhere at all. Those years of driving gave her an unusually close knowledge of horses and a lasting anger at the way many of them were treated. She wrote Black Beauty slowly over several years while she was ill, often dictating it to her mother because she was too weak to write, and it was the only book she ever published. It appeared in 1877, and Anna Sewell died a few months later, before she could see it become one of the best-loved books in the English language.

In the England of the 1870s, almost nothing moved without a horse. Cabs, omnibuses, delivery carts, farm wagons, fire engines, and private carriages were all horse-drawn, and city streets were crowded with animals working long hours on hard stone pavement. Reformers had begun to argue that animals deserved legal protection, and Sewell aimed her book squarely at the people who handled horses every day: grooms, drivers, and owners. She attacked specific practices by name, especially the bearing rein, a strap that forced a carriage horse to hold its head unnaturally high because fashionable owners thought it looked stylish. The book was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, was handed out to cab drivers and stable hands, and is often credited with helping to change how working animals were treated. It also helped invent a whole genre — the animal autobiography — that children's writers have been using ever since.