| Anna
Sewell |
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| Nationality - English |
Profession - Author |
| Date of birth - 20 Mar 1820
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Date of death - 1878 |
| Place of birth
- : Norfolk |
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Anna Sewell was born in England in 1820. Of course, the world knows her best for her single work, Black Beauty, the life and times of a black horse with a single sock and a star, from his happy youth to his pleasant retirement and the turbulent events inbetween.
At the time, England was called a "hell for horses". As a young Quaker girl, she and her mother often saw horses suffering terribly in the towns and cities. Many were old, underfed or lame and sore. Often, they were pulling overloaded carts, in the hot sun, freezing rain and even snow. Few people cared for the welfare of the horses who were overworked. Most of them fell dead in the harness from exhaustion. Drivers would beat them as well. Anna and her mother protested every time they saw abuse like this. Some drivers even threatened to beat them too.
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Anna's own life was filled with pain and suffering, although she did not complain about it. When she was fourteen, she fell and injured one of her knees. It did not heal properly, leaving her disabled and in pain, which grew worse as she grew older. She walked with a crutch, but rode and drove horses very well. Anna's mother wrote books for children, and Anna copied out her manuscripts by hand.
Her father was a bank manager, and Anna drove him to work whenver they had a horse. They could not always afford to keep horses, however, she was amazingly skilled with them, usually controlling them with voice alone, drove with a loose rein and never used a whip. She was once heard to say to her horse "We must get thee to the station right away, or else everyone will be cross".
Anna wrote Black Beauty in her fifties. She could no longer leave the house, and died about a year after it was published in 1877. In Black Beauty, she wrote about all the abuses and horses she had seen and known in her life, bringing them together in a gentle and persuasive way. Because the book is written from Beauty's point of view, the reader begins to understand the impact good and bad treatment had on the horse and his friends, and that animals do feel pain. Besides having bad owners, Beauty also has many good ones. Sewell uses them to show the difference an owner makes in an animals life. Beauty willing works his heart out to Jerry the cab driver; but becomes depressed when he is sold to a less honourable man.
Beauty is based on a horse named Bessie, who was owned by her brother and said to be "full of the spirit". She also had a grey pony that she loved very much. He became Merrylegs.
Black Beauty had a tremendous impact. The bearing rein went out of style, and a new wave of humanist thinking towards animals emerged. George Ansell, the founder of an early American animal welfare group, had 100 000 copies printed privately and handed out to people who work with horses. In the span of about 100 years, over 30 million copies have been printed, an all time record for a fiction book.
Ironically, during her funeral procession, her mother noticed that all the horses were wearing bearing reins. She went from carriage to carriage, requesting that they be removed, which they were. She only made a few pounds from Black Beauty, but it has lived on in many forms. The book has been made into at least eight movies (the most recent one being my favourite). Breyer has produced three Black Beauty models; two of them are large 12 inch horses while the third is part of a smaller sized set including Merrylegs, Ginger and Beauty's mother, Duchess. Royal Doulton also has it's porcelain version.
Three British sisters, Christine, Diana and Josephine Pullein-Thompson, wrote two sequels to Black Beauty - Black Beauty's Kin and Black Beauty's Family. Each is made up of three short books written by each sister. They made "Black Beauties" for several more recent time periods - the end of the century, the early twentieth century and the Great Depression. Christine went on to write more books about animals and her most recent series is about a black labrador named Jesse.
Critics call the book preachy, sentimental and melodramatic, but this is not true. Like any writer who hopes to change how people think and feel, Anna chose a subject close to her heart and wrote ernestly about it. Black Beauty reminds us that we share our lives with other living beings, and owe much of our own successes to those who were powerless to change their own lives.
Oxford Companion to Children's Literature |
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Anna Sewell
bibliography - 3
listed |
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