More than a children’s book: A

surface reading of Anna Sewell’s Black

Abstract
This article employs Margaret Cohen’s notion of the ‘generic horizon’ to explore the production and
reception of Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty. It uses a ‘surface reading’ methodology, focusing
on the novel’s contemporary generic context and on how the book was received and marketed. This
allows the article to interrogate critical commonplaces about the novel’s genre. While Black Beauty is
typically considered a children’s book, the novel in fact had a considerable adult audience, especially
among working-class men. This article sheds new light on Black Beauty’s genre through its contextual
reading of moralistic, animal-centric children’s literature, and didactic tracts on horse management. It
contends that the novel is a sophisticated exploration of the suffering and indignities faced by both
horses and their working-class handlers in Victorian England. Reading the novel alongside
contemporary horse care manuals brings into focus Sewell’s serious didactic purpose, in both teaching
the correct means of tending horses and in presenting them as feeling, sympathetic beings in their own
right. This article argues that Sewell’s novel deserves to be read as a significant contribution to
nineteenth-century debates about animal welfare.
***
Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty is a classic tale of equine welfare. It is written in the first-
person from the perspective of a horse, Black Beauty, who relates his life as a carriage horse in Victorian
England. Born in an idyllic countryside setting, Black Beauty is broken in and trained humanely for life
as a working carriage horse. Although his first masters are kindly, he is soon sold into a series of
progressively harsher situations. He eventually comes to work as a cab horse, pulling a hansom cab
through the perilous London streets. Throughout his tale, Black Beauty encounters other horses who
recount their plight; most notably, the mare Ginger narrates the mistreatment she has received from a
young age, which has rendered her antagonistic towards humans. By contrast, Black Beauty’s fortunate
early upbringing enables him better to endure his subsequent trials. His forbearance in the face of pain
and hardship is rewarded at the close of the novel, when he is retired to the country and reunited with a
kindly coachman. Black Beauty’s experiences span class and geographical distinctions and offer a
nuanced portrait of equine life and welfare in late Victorian England.
Sewell was an invalid for much of her life, and relied considerably on horses for transportation, forging
close bonds with them. 1 This is reflected in her sympathetic portrayals of her equine characters. She
wrote the novel near the end of her life, in a plain style influenced by her Quaker mother’s didactic,
evangelical tracts. 2 Black Beauty is now generally regarded as a children’s book, due to its unassuming
style. It is considered the precursor of many children’s stories featuring anthropomorphised animals,
and is today most commonly marketed towards children. 3 However, as this article will demonstrate, the

1
Adrienne E. Gavin, ‘Introduction’, in Black Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xi.
2
Ibid, x-xi.
3
See, for instance, the Viking Children’s Classics edition—Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (New York: Viking, 2000)—and the Puffin Classics
edition—Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (London: Puffin Books, 2010). Among other scholars who treat Black Beauty as a children’s book are
John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children’s Literature (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1996), and
James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1980).
 More than a children’s book: A surface reading of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty

novel was originally aimed at working-class men, and enjoyed a considerable adult audience in the
nineteenth century.
This article uses Margaret Cohen’s article ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’ as a starting point
for a discussion of Black Beauty’s production and reception. A focus on the novel’s generic context,
and on the ways in which it was received and marketed, raises questions concerning critical
commonplaces about its genre. A reading of Black Beauty in the context of the period’s moralistic,
animal-centric children’s literature, and contemporaneous didactic tracts on horse management, sheds
new light on the novel’s genre and aims. I argue that Black Beauty has much in common with books
designed to inculcate good principles of equine care in grooms and stablemen, and that this is reflected
in Sewell’s depiction of her working-class characters.
In ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, Cohen argues that critics should take seriously popular
fiction, which has been largely ignored, often due to its female authorship or working-class readership.
She hence advocates that scholars apply ‘narratology to the archive of neglected aesthetics’.4 Cohen
describes her project of exploring various understudied genres as a ‘thick history of the novel’s diverse
aesthetics’; that is, she seeks to complicate the traditional narrative of the ‘rise of the novel’. This critical
commonplace bypasses popular genres by concentrating almost exclusively on the nineteenth-century
realist novel such as Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine and Eliot’s Middlemarch, and the twentieth-century
modernist novel, for instance Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Instead of this narrow focus,
Cohen attempts to recover a ‘historical account of poetic taste’ and to take seriously genres that have
been denied sustained critical attention.
To achieve this, Cohen rejects Fredric Jameson’s notion of ‘symptomatic reading’, which seeks to
recover the repressed ‘textual unconscious’ and which argues that what a text does not say is more
important than what it says. 5 Cohen argues that this form of reading is inadequate to deal with non-
canonical, popular genres, which often lack the complexity to sustain a traditional close reading. Cohen
hence advocates for a new kind of ‘surface reading’ which explores a large number of texts
superficially, looking for tropes and patterns between texts, rather than undertaking a close reading of
a small number of novels. This enables Cohen to uncover what she calls the ‘generic horizon’ of texts
with which contemporary audiences would have been familiar, but which have been largely overlooked
by conventional literary history. 6 Cohen argues that critics often assume they are familiar with a text’s
genre, without situating it within its historical context. She describes this phenomenon as the fallacy of
the ‘horizon of generic expectation’. 7 Cohen advocates that scholars address this critical blind spot by
‘situat[ing] individual works in relation to their generic horizon’. 8
Cohen’s notion of ‘surface reading’ does not invalidate close reading, but rather provides a new
contextual angle which can be applied to canonical and popular texts. Her method involves both close
reading of a small number of ‘literary’ texts and a more distant reading of their generic contexts, which
largely involves popular and non-literary types of writing. Although in practice this can reinforce the
divide between so-called ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ texts, Cohen’s methodology is a useful strategy for
grappling with a wide range of material, and for placing texts which are often read ahistorically back
into their specific contexts. Cohen applies this method of close attention to the ‘generic horizon’ in her
book The Novel and the Sea, in which she explores the genre of maritime adventure fiction from
Robinson Crusoe to Joseph Conrad. 9 Cohen creates a contextual ‘thick history’ through an exploration
of non-fictional captains’ logs and popular sea fiction. This enables her, for example, to place Conrad’s
modernist, seafaring novels within the context of similar books in more popular genres.
Cohen’s focus on the contemporary reception of novels and their genres—and her insistence on placing
texts within ‘a wider archive’, including popular and non-canonical texts—is especially relevant for a

4
Margaret Cohen, ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 55, doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.51.
5
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 106.
6
Cohen, ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, 57.
7
Ibid, 58.
8
Ibid, 57.
9
Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

37
The ANU Undergraduate Research Journal

reading of Black Beauty. While the novel is now largely categorised as children’s literature, an
exploration of the contemporary context of its production and dissemination can provide new and more
productive approaches to examining the text.
Although today children comprise the book’s primary audience, this was not true for its original
public. 10 The book had a substantial working-class readership, and was marketed directly to men who
worked with horses, to encourage them to treat their horses well and care for them effectively. 11 The
book was promoted by the London City Mission to Cabmen, and some cabmen reportedly declared it
‘the best book in the world’. 12 Black Beauty was also modestly priced to attract a working-class
audience. While a luxury edition was sold for five shillings, the book was also issued at lower prices,
including a ‘popular paper’ which cost one shilling. 13 By 1879 the book was in its sixth British edition,
and the novel had sold over 100,000 copies by 1890. 14 Moreover, an 1878 review declared that while
the story ‘may be read with pleasure and profit by educated people’, it should primarily be ‘put into the
hands of stable boys, or any who have [anything] to do with horses’. 15 The literacy levels of the working
classes increased considerably and rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by 1900
virtually all young married couples were capable of signing their names. 16
The cab trade was a major employer of working-class men in Victorian London. In 1851, there were
6,039 licensed cab drivers in the capital, while by 1891 there were 15,219. It was estimated that, in
1864, 50,000 people depended on cabs for their livelihood. 17 However, a cab driver’s income fluctuated
depending on the season and on the chance of getting enough customers. Moreover, the trade was
particularly precarious for cab drivers who rented their horse and carriage from often unscrupulous cab
proprietors. For instance, a cab driver reported in 1877 that his income had fallen from £2 to only 30
shillings per week due to increases in the rates charged by cab owners. 18 Parliamentary papers record
poor conditions for cab drivers around the time Sewell was writing her novel. The London
Commissioner of Police reported that trade was slack in 1875, forcing many proprietors of small cab
companies out of business. In the same year, the police received reports of 527 horses ‘unfit for use’. 19
Sewell’s advocacy for the humane treatment of horses was hence particularly suited to a readership of
working-class cab men. The increase in literacy levels during the nineteenth century meant that Sewell’s
book was able to reach a large working-class audience. 20
Despite this evidence of a considerable adult audience, much analysis of Black Beauty has placed the
novel in a tradition of children’s literature featuring animals. Scholars such as Peter Hunt have treated
the novel as an early example of the craze for talking or anthropomorphised animals in children’s
literature, from The Jungle Book, published in 1894, to twentieth-century examples such as Beatrix

10
Thus, for example, Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 179 take for granted that Black Beauty is a ‘juvenile book’, claiming that it remains on many
reading lists for students at American junior high schools.
11
Adrienne E. Gavin, Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), 185.
12
Mrs [Mary] Bayly, The Life and Letters of Mrs Sewell (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1889), 273.
13
Susan Chitty, The Woman Who Wrote Black Beauty: A Life of Anna Sewell (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971), 223; Anna Sewell,
Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1895), end matter.
14
Gavin, Dark Horse, 187; see also ‘Black Beauty’, Arthur Stebbings’ Model Railway Time Table, and Travellers’ Guide, no. 6 (1879): 27,
link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/PRPFXM101455670/GDCS?u=nla&sid=GDCS&xid=6b54544b
15
‘LITERATURE’, Essex Standard, West Suffolk Gazette, and Eastern Counties’ Advertiser (24 August 1878): 6,
find.galegroup.com.rp.nla.gov.au/dvnw/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=DVNW&userGroupName=nla&tabID=T003&docPage=article
&docId=R3208617146&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0. It is interesting to note that advertisements placed in a Travellers’
Guide described the novel as ‘one of the most interesting books ever written’, clearly appealing to its general interest, rather than
specifically to children’s interest. See ‘Black Beauty’, Arthur Stebbings’ Model Railway, 27.
16
Jonathan Rose, ‘Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader’, in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and
William B. Thesing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 33, doi.org/10.1002/9780470996324.ch3.
17
Trevor May, Gondolas and Growlers: The History of the London Horse Cab (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995), vi.
18
Adolphe Smith and John Thomson, Street Life in London (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1877), 5.
19
‘Reports of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis for 1875’, 1876, Command Papers, Nineteenth Century House of Commons
Sessional Papers, vol. 34, 5, parlipapers.proquest.com/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1876-052134?accountid=12694.
20
Rose, ‘Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader’, 33.

38
 More than a children’s book: A surface reading of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty

Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Jack London’s White Fang, and Michael Bond’s Paddington. 21 Lori
Jo Oswald, moreover, treats Black Beauty as an example of the stereotypical noble horse in children’s
animal fiction.22 Other critics have drawn attention more productively to Black Beauty’s place within a
tradition of moralistic first-person animal autobiography, written for children and designed to inculcate
moral values. 23
While Black Beauty shares certain traits with this children’s literature, the novel is more generically
complex than such an identification would suggest. Black Beauty is fundamentally a didactic tale, and
while it is not aimed primarily or solely at children, it contains elements of the moral tale. Yet Black
Beauty is not a mere moralistic fable, but rather intervenes in some of the most important nineteenth-
century debates surrounding the treatment and welfare of horses. Moreover, its wealth of practical detail
made it a useful handbook for working-class men who looked after horses. Thus, Black Beauty contains
considerably more than the ‘slightly sentimental social criticism’ of Peter Hunt’s formulation.24
A comparison of Black Beauty with other first-person animal autobiographies of the period
demonstrates that Sewell’s novel eschews many of the conventions of the animal moral fable, in favour
of a more commonsense, factual narrative. The moralistic first-person animal autobiographies of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries largely concerned domestic and household animals such as cats,
donkeys, or mice, and were written primarily for children. While scholars such as Margaret Blount and
Tess Cosslett have stressed Black Beauty’s similarities to this moralistic genre, it is in fact the novel’s
exceptionality which is more notable. 25 A good point of comparison with Black Beauty is the 1863 book
Rambles of a Rat, one of the closest in time of publication to Black Beauty. Brought out
pseudonymously by ‘a lady of England’, the tale was in fact written by prolific children’s author
Charlotte Maria Tucker. The story follows the adventures of a rat, unimaginatively named Ratto, whose
‘rambles’ didactically encourage good, moral behaviour in children. Ratto discovers the evils of opium,
meets a rat who compares human hotels to rat traps, and ultimately learns the importance of charity and
kindness to all.
By contrast with Sewell’s realistic narrative, Tucker cultivates sympathy for the rats by
anthropomorphising them. She gives her rats human attributes and emotions, with little regard for
scientific accuracy, and adopts a sentimentalising and condescending tone. Ratto claims that he leads a
‘merry life’ with his seven brothers in a warehouse near the Thames. Instead of dwelling on the dirtiness
and dinginess of such an existence, Ratto claims that he lives in a ‘palace of rubbish’ or ‘a mansion of
odds and ends’. 26 Even the death of his six brothers in a trap is not treated as a traumatic experience;
rather, Ratto elides this embarrassing episode. He declares that since ‘this is a very melancholy part of
my story’, he will ‘hasten over it as fast as I can’. He is unable to state plainly that they have been killed,
instead observing euphemistically that the rats were ‘carried off in a bag to be worried by dogs in the
morning!’ 27 This inability to speak plainly about death contrasts with Black Beauty’s realistic and
detailed description of the suffering and death of Ginger. Her dead body is described in graphic detail,
with its ‘lifeless tongue … slowly dropping with blood’ and its ‘sunken eyes’. 28 While Black Beauty
certainly uses elements of the moralising animal tale, Sewell’s novel is set apart by its focus on the
physical welfare and suffering of horses.
Sewell’s first-person ventriloquised narration is considerably more sophisticated than Tucker’s, as
Sewell highlights the equine experience in her novel. Sewell portrays horses as sentient creatures,

21
Peter Hunt, Children’s Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 147–49. Note that White Fang was also written from the perspective of an
animal—a wild wolfdog—albeit in the third person.
22
Lori Jo Oswald, ‘Heroes and Victims: The Stereotyping of Animal Characters in Children’s Realistic Animal Fiction’, Children’s
Literature in Education 26, no. 2 (June 1995): 139–40, doi.org/10.1007/BF02535736.
23
Margaret Blount, Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1975), 249–50; Tess
Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 69–90.
24
Hunt, Children’s Literature, 147–48.
25
Blount, Animal Land, 249–50; Cosslett, Talking Animals, 69–90.
26
A.L.O.E., The Rambles of a Rat (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1863), 9.
27
Ibid, 17.
28
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, Viking ed., 168.

39
The ANU Undergraduate Research Journal

countering the common view of horses as commodities to be bought and used. She exposes the
indignities of horse markets and denounces drivers who employ horses as though they were machines.
The pony Merrylegs complains that boys treat him ‘like a steam engine or a thrashing machine’ which
can ‘go on as long and as fast as they please’.29 Sewell, moreover, concentrates on the physical
discomfort of working horses in Victorian England. The scenes of breaking in Black Beauty and Ginger
emphasise the physical pain of the process. Black Beauty describes the bit as a ‘nasty thing’, describing
the ‘feel’ of ‘a great piece of cold hard steel … pushed into one’s mouth’. 30 Later, he complains about
‘straps here and straps there, a bit in [his] mouth and blinkers over [his] eyes’. 31 Thus, Sewell attempts
to demonstrate the tangible reality of being a horse, describing sensations and emotions as a horse would
have felt them, rather than imposing human attributes onto the animal. Robert Dingley argues that Black
Beauty fails to adequately condemn systemic injustices towards horses, and describes the novel as
merely a ‘horse of instruction’. 32 Yet Sewell’s informative approach is in its own way radical, especially
when placed within the context of contemporary didactic literature on horses.
It is useful to read the novel alongside two works of the same period: Samuel Sidney’s large and
handsome manual on equine care for the middle class, The Book of the Horse, and the working man’s
handbook, The Horse Book, produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
(RSPCA). Moreover, it is useful to compare The Book of the Horse and The Horse Book, since there
has been some scholarly confusion between the two. In early British editions of Black Beauty, an
afterword recommends to the reader an ‘admirable little book, price fourpence’ which sets out the ‘right
treatment of horses’ and whose ‘directions’ are ‘short, clear, and full of common sense’. 33 The most
recent scholarly publication of the novel, Kristen Guest’s 2016 edition for Broadview, claims that this
‘little book’ is an abridged version of The Book of the Horse, a large manual about horse purchase and
care for the aspirational middle class. 34 My research, however, has led me to the same conclusion as
Sewell’s biographer, Adrienne Gavin, who identifies The Horse Book as a short didactic tract published
by the RSPCA. 35 I argue that Sewell did not mistake The Horse Book for The Book of the Horse, as
Guest assumes, but rather that the two are separate works, designed for very different audiences, as will
be illustrated below.
The Book of the Horse, written by Samuel Sidney—and revised in later editions by George Fleming—
is an imposing tome designed for a newly wealthy middle class who had little experience with the horses
that now symbolised their rising wealth and status. The full edition of more than 600 pages contains
numerous wood engravings and 25 full-page coloured plates, and is bound in gilt-trimmed leather with
marbled edges. Even a reduced version of the book would have cost considerably more than the
fourpenny book Sewell recommends. 36 A far more likely candidate for the book Sewell mentions is The
Horse Book, a slim 70-page tract produced by the RSPCA. This confusion between a middle-class status
symbol and a practical handbook for working people is emblematic of much of the criticism of Black
Beauty, whose lack of historical contextualisation has caused widespread misreading of the novel’s
generic horizon.
Sidney’s The Book of the Horse differs considerably from Black Beauty. It privileges the human
experience over the animal, and addresses an aspirational middle-class audience. By contrast, Sewell is
considerably more interested in the equine and working-class experience. While The Book of the Horse
provides advice which Sewell would have approved of—for example, how to train a horse not to be
scared of the railway—its concerns are fundamentally different from those of Sewell’s novel. The tone,
readership and perspective of both books differ dramatically. Sidney explicitly states that he writes for

29
Ibid, 40.
30
Ibid, 15.
31
Ibid, 27.
32
Robert Dingley, ‘A Horse of a Different Colour: Black Beauty and the Pressures of Indebtedness’, Victorian Literature and Culture 25,
no. 2 (September 1997): 241–51, doi.org/10.1017/S1060150300004769.
33
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, Jarrold ed., end matter.
34
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, ed. Kristen Guest (Ontario: Broadview, 2016), 193, 231.
35
Gavin, Dark Horse, 198–99.
36
I have, moreover, been unable to find proof that such an abridged version ever existed.

40
 More than a children’s book: A surface reading of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty

a ‘class’ of people ‘to whom town pursuits have brought fortune’ and who want to experience ‘the
pleasures, the exercise, the healthy excitement which horses and carriages, riding, driving, and hunting,
so eminently afford’. 37 Sidney devotes a considerable portion of his book to horse pedigree and
breeding, topics on which Black Beauty has very little to say.
Moreover, The Book of the Horse contains an enthusiastic and detailed description of the joys and
technicalities of hare, fox, and deer hunting. Sidney quotes approvingly Washington Irving’s remark
that hunting has a ‘great and salutary effect upon the national character’. 38 Sewell denounces this
practice for its cruelty, and for its danger to both humans and horses. Black Beauty witnesses the fall
and subsequent death of his brother Rob Roy, whose neck is broken while hunting, and also the death
of the young squire who was riding him. Black Beauty’s mother denounces the sport, claiming that it
‘often spoil[s] good horses’ and ‘tear[s] up the fields’. 39 Samuel Sidney, by contrast, is very cavalier
about the possible dangers of hunting, showing complete disregard for the potential injuries to horses.
Indeed, Sidney’s priority throughout his book is the human, not the horse. He urges owners to sell a
dangerous horse, without considering the fate of an unrideable horse who, like Black Beauty, would be
sold for hard, menial work. Coachmen, for Sidney, are as expendable as the horses they care for. Sidney
advises that if a coachman ‘continually has a horse lame, sick or off his feed’, then the ‘proper plan’ is
simply to ‘get rid of the coachman’. 40
While Sewell’s novel is similarly didactic, she addresses a very different audience from Sidney. Black
Beauty hence has considerably more in common with the RSPCA-produced pamphlet The Horse Book
than with Sidney’s tome. Many thousands of copies of The Horse Book were issued, and by 1881 the
book had reached its tenth edition, with 50,000 copies printed that year alone. 41 The preface states that
it ‘has been written as simply as possible’, and indeed the book arranges its subject matter into brief
chapters, and then into simple points of a few sentences each. 42 There is considerable overlap between
its concerns and those of Sewell in Black Beauty. For example, it deals with the best kind of stable for
horses, how to feed and groom them correctly, and how to prevent accidents. These practical hints are,
in great part, replicated in Black Beauty, which equally recommends the light, airy, and well-drained
stables, large stalls and ‘kindness and gentle treatment’ advocated by The Horse Book. 43 The two books
are also alike in the plainness of their style. Black Beauty’s simplicity of style is perhaps not so much a
marker of its status as a children’s book, as it is an attempt to speak directly to the working class.
Moreover, it is significant that Sewell’s novel shares similarities with this RSPCA-produced book, since
the Society credited Sewell with assisting in their campaign against the trade in horse flesh for human
consumption, by demonstrating the cruelty of sending horses to the knackers to be slaughtered after a
lifetime of faithful service. 44 Early editions of the novel contained a recommendation by the RSPCA
before the title page. 45 Yet Sewell herself implicitly criticises the RSPCA’s refusal to address upper-
class cruelty towards animals. The Society was often censured for its hypocrisy in castigating the
working classes for their cruelty towards animals while ignoring carriage horses wearing a painfully
tight bearing rein, or the cruelties of hare and fox hunting. 46 George Fleming’s letter on the bearing
rein—in which he blames coachmen, rather than their masters, for its use—represents a typical RSPCA

37
S. Sidney, The Book of the Horse: (Thorough-Bred, Half-Bred, Cart-Bred,) Saddle and Harness, British and Foreign, with Hints on
Horsemanship; The Management of the Stable; Breeding, Breaking, and Training for the Road, the Park, and the Field, 2nd ed. (London:
Cassell, Petters, Galpin & Co., 1879), 5, doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.27093.
38
Ibid, 395, 401.
39
Sewell, Black Beauty, Viking ed., 12–13.
40
Sidney, The Book of the Horse, 518.
41
Arthur W. Moss, Valiant Crusade: The History of the R.S.P.C.A. (London: Cassell, 1961), 92.
42
RSPCA, The Horse Book: Being Simple Rules for Managing and Keeping a Horse Humanely and Advantageously in the Stable and on
the Road, to Which Are Added a Few Words on the Horse’s Eye, Foot and Stomach, and Hints on Draught (London: The RSPCA, 1865), 3.
43
Ibid, 7–9.
44
Moss, Valiant Crusade, 96–97.
45
Sewell, Black Beauty, Jarrold ed., front matter.
46
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987), 137–49.

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opinion. 47 Anna Sewell, by contrast, demonstrates that it is wealthy owners who use the bearing rein
most egregiously. Thus, despite the misgivings of a groom, one of Black Beauty’s rich mistresses forces
him to wear a tight rein, which causes him to ‘foam at the mouth’, and ‘made [his] breathing very
uncomfortable’. 48
The novel’s conclusion is largely utopian, providing the outcome that Black Beauty deserves, but not
the one he would have likely received in the real world. Yet Sewell undercuts the ending’s apparent
sentimentalism, in a reminder that Black Beauty is far more than a children’s fable. Black Beauty is not
a middle-class children’s book, but a novel whose generic context reveals Sewell’s profound sympathy
for horses and their working-class handlers. This generic realignment of the novel necessitates a
reconsideration of the novel’s apparently idyllic ending. In the context of Sewell’s portrayal of working-
class life, the ending—in which both Black Beauty and the cab driver Jerry retire to rural bliss—is
perhaps more utopian than realistic. While the novel requires this ending to conform to its sentimental,
didactic mode of virtue triumphantly rewarded, there are enough cracks in this perfect façade to point
the reader to a more dismally realistic conclusion.49 While Black Beauty and the kindly cabman Jerry
receive their happy endings, the miserable fates of other characters suggest that such an optimistic
ending is simply aleatory. The good fortune which awaits Black Beauty is not shared by other horses
in the novel. Ginger dies from overwork and is sent to the knackers, while Sewell implies that even the
peaceable Merrylegs might suffer a similarly dismal lot. While in London, Black Beauty notices ‘a little
grey pony with a thick mane and a pretty head’ who looks ‘so much like Merrylegs’. This pony is being
cruelly treated, pulling a ‘heavy cart’ while a boy ‘[cut] him under the belly with his whip’ and
‘chuck[ed] cruelly at his little mouth’. 50 Indeed, the final line of the novel belies the apparent utopianism
of the ending, as in his happy retirement Black Beauty ‘fanc[ies]’ that he is ‘still in the orchard at
Birtwick’ with his ‘old friends’.51 This reference to his ‘old friends’ reminds the reader of the miserable
fates of Ginger and Merrylegs, who Black Beauty knew in his youth, and draws attention to the
extraordinary chance by which Beauty was saved from a similar fate.
A reading of Black Beauty through Margaret Cohen’s notion of the ‘generic horizon’ generates a
productive interpretation of the novel’s genre. This article demonstrates the potential for the application
of Cohen’s notion of ‘surface reading’ beyond her own research into nineteenth-century seafaring
narratives. Such close attention to the historical and literary context of Sewell’s Black Beauty enables
an understanding of the novel’s genre. Instead of viewing it as a simple, moral tale aimed at children,
it is instead possible to view the novel as a complex and multifaceted exploration of the suffering and
indignities faced by both horses and their working-class handlers in Victorian England. Reading the
novel alongside contemporary horse care manuals brings into focus Sewell’s serious didactic purpose,
in both teaching the correct means of tending horses, and in presenting them as feeling, sympathetic
beings in their own right. Sewell’s novel hence deserves to be read as a significant contribution to
debates about animal welfare both in the nineteenth century and today.

Bibliography
Primary sources
A.L.O.E. The Rambles of a Rat. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1863.
Bayly, Mrs [Mary]. The Life and Letters of Mrs Sewell. London: James Nisbet and Co., 1889.

47
George Fleming, ‘Cruelty to Horses’, Times, August 13, 1874, 6,
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Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900: Patriots, Nation, and Empire (Ann Arbor: The University of
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Sewell, Black Beauty, Viking ed., 169.
51
Ibid, 206.

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