Anna Sewell
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who she was
Anna Sewell was born at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk on March 30, 1820, and died on April 25, 1878. She was raised a Quaker, in a family of modest means, and her mother Mary Wright Sewell was herself a published writer of children's books.
At fourteen she injured her ankles badly in a fall and never walked properly again. For the rest of her life she depended on horse-drawn carriages to go anywhere at all, and she drove herself. That is the whole origin of the book: decades of close, daily, practical dealing with horses, by a woman who could not manage without them.
Why she wrote it
She wrote it between about 1871 and 1877, in her fifties, largely bedridden and in declining health, dictating to her mother when she could not write herself.
She stated her purpose plainly: to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses. It was aimed at the men who worked them, not at children. She sold it outright to a local publisher for twenty pounds. It appeared in 1877, and she died five months later, having lived just long enough to see it begin to sell and nowhere near long enough to see what it did.
The book we publish, and why
We publish Black Beauty in hardcover, with closing annotations drawing on the horse imagery in Revelation. The passages come from the Douay-Rheims Bible and are presented as historical reading.
The decision that makes the book is the voice. It is told by the horse, which puts the reader on the wrong end of the reins and leaves him there. Cruelty appears as ordinary: not monstrous, just thoughtless, done by busy men in a hurry. So does decency. The bearing rein, the overloaded cab, the groom who waters a hot horse carelessly, all of it is shown in working detail by someone who knew exactly how it was done.
The benefit is moral imagination. A child learns to consider a creature that cannot complain, cannot explain, and will not be believed if it tries. That transfers to people, which is the point.
How to read it with a child
It reads aloud beautifully and is well suited to a child of about seven upward listening, or nine upward reading alone. The chapters are short, which makes it a natural one-a-night book.
Be ready for the hard parts. Ginger's story does not end well, and the chapter where Beauty meets her for the last time is the one children remember for forty years. Do not skip it, and do not read it as the last thing if your child takes things to bed with them. The book earns its ending, but it goes through grief to get there.
The question to ask afterward is the one the whole book is built on: who had the power in that chapter, and what did they choose to do with it? Ask it of the grooms, the owners and the dealers in turn. A child will answer it better than most adults.
Pair it with
- Revelation, with passages from the Douay-Rheims Bible included in the closing annotations as historical reading, particularly the white horse in Revelation 19 and the four horsemen in Revelation 6.
- The Junior Genius Method, our approach of Read, Notice, Write, Recite, Remember, Question, Apply. Black Beauty suits it unusually well because almost every chapter contains one clear decision to notice.
-
Johanna Spyri, Heidi, for a child ready for another story about what kind of care makes a creature thrive.
Her works
It is the only book she wrote. She also assisted her mother with her writing over many years.
General reference on Anna Sewell. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.