SECOND READING 30

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)

PEACEFUL DAYS passed in the meadow with his wise mother, followed by livelier sessions playing with the other colts provide the narrator with a happy, early life. There is also the confidence of being the handsome well-bred grandson of a race horse twice victorious at Newmarket.

Black Beauty seems destined for a pampered future as a gentleman's accessory. At four he is purchased by the local squire. He is fortunate in that his loving first master who bred him, undertakes the breaking.

Although he recalls the gentle hands that introduced a bit to his mouth and a saddle on his back, Black Beauty is honest and is sensitive to pain: "Those who have never had a bit in their mouths, cannot think how bad it feels; a great piece of cold, hard steel as thick as a man's finger to be pushed into one's mouth, between one's teeth and over one's tongue, with the ends coming out at the corner of your mouth, and held fast there by straps over your head, under your throat, round your nose, and under your chin. . .".

Norfolk-born Anna Sewell's enduring classic gives an account of one horse's progress from ease and affection to suffering through a series of experiences which become steadily worse.

It is an important book - it is also a great novel. At the centre of all of the grief and cruelty is man.

Sewell became an invalid at the age of 14 until her death at 58, a few months after the publication of this, her only book. She loved horses - and justice.

Her love was practical, not romantic. She was all too aware of the abuse horses endured at all levels of Victorian society through the careless antics of the gentry at play on the hunting field to the impossible labour demanded of working horses. This most moving of stories told by an innocent, increasingly despairing hero is, for all its appeal, graphic polemic at its most powerful. It is also a vivid social history.

Black Beauty quickly settles at Birtwick. He has a good temperament having only known kindness. There is a dramatic new difference. Instead of playing in the fields, he is now expected to stand in a stable and serve as both riding and carriage horse. He makes friends with Ginger, a mare whose personality has been ruined by cruelty. She is destined for tragedy. Sewell makes many welfare points, particularly her condemnation of the vicious bearing rein which was used to keep the heads of carriage and haulage horses held unnaturally high, even when confronted by steep hills and heavy loads.

One of the strongest set pieces describes slowly waking up to the strange sensation of fear as fire tears through the stables at an inn. Black Beauty's world changes when the squire's wife becomes seriously ill and the family leaves England, causing the horses to be sold. His new owner is a lord whose wife insists on the use of bearing reins. More problems emerge through the carelessness of an alcoholic stableman who rides him hard with a missing shoe, causing the horse to damage his knees, while the drunk dies in the fall. The writing is plain, direct and brilliantly observed. Sewell evokes the intelligence of the animal without faltering into whimsy or fantasy.

His scarred knees cause Black Beauty to be sold. He begins a career of desperate hardship, such as being rented as a "Job horse". One such client drives him hard despite the lameness caused by a stone in his foot. By the time Black Beauty arrives at a horse fair, he accepts his days as a valued horse are over. Yet he is bought by a kindly London cabbie. The work is hard but Jerry the cab man and his family love "Jack" as they name him. In Jerry's yard he meets Captain, an old horse who had survived the horrors of the Crimean War. Black Beauty enjoys living with Jerry but when the cabbie becomes dangerously ill, he is again sold and is soon hauling massive loads. Just when Black Beauty sees death as his only release, a miracle happens.

Sewell set out to change attitudes and created in her narrator a mild-mannered, unforgettable hero, weary by much of what he has experienced and convincingly philosophical in a story of profound emotion.

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This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon