On Rereading Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

Having included Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty in my list of favourite childhood books last week, I was prompted to read it again. It wasn’t the first time I’d read it as an adult, but it has been many years since I revisited the story.

To me as a child it had been simply the story of a horse and his friends, a story full of love, grief, thrills, suffering, and ultimately a happy homecoming. I loved the fact that Black Beauty told his story for himself, as do some of the other horses, such as Captain the war horse and the highly-strung Ginger. I thought it right and proper that Black Beauty should pass judgment on the humans who had the care of him, that he should voice criticism, blame, or sympathy. Black Beauty was in service, but he was never servile, he had dignity, he had pride.

But as I reread it this week I was struck by a number of things I had missed as a child, and by how glaringly obvious they are to me now! The book is riddled with class, its whole structure depends on class: gentry and groom, thoroughbred and carthorse. Black Beauty’s descent on the social scale is signified by the social status of his owners, from the Squire who is his first purchaser to the “low set of drivers” who work in a cab firm. This is mirrored in an equine class structure as he goes from a valuable carriage horse, to a £24 10s cab horse, to a broken down old animal worth £5. It was received in class terms too: as one reviewer suggested “If widely distributed by some rich and benevolent lady or gentleman among drivers, grooms, and ostlers, the book would help much to diminish that abounding cruelty to horses which so sickens the human heart” (Lichfield Mercury, 5 April 1878).

It is class that shapes the book, that determines its settings, plot, and characters, and it is class that gives it its didactic purpose. The class structure requires certain kinds of behaviour. The upper and middle classes must be benevolent, reasonable, philanthropic; the working classes must be dutiful, hard working, uncomplaining, respectful, honest, sober, content with what they have. The good characters – signalled by names like John Manly – are the respectful ones, the hard-working ones, the ones who know their place, the ones who are duly grateful.

Clearly, the duties imposed on the working class are much more onerous than those imposed on the better off, no doubt because they’re tougher to pull off. The upper classes can kid themselves all they like, but they know in their hearts that the working classes have good reason not to be content with what they have. And so the tract was born, that homely, simple, hearthside-and-village-smithy genre of moral tales foisted on the poor by charitable literary ladies and their clergymen allies.

This is the tradition which Anna Sewell has inherited, and that very directly from her mother, the writer Mary Sewell, who contributed to publisher Jarrold and Sons’ series of Household Tracts for the People. Mary Sewell’s Homely Ballads for the Working Man's Fireside (1858) “instruct young readers on the virtues of temperance, hard work, kindness to the poor, and humility” (Orlando). It was Jarrold and Sons who published her daughter’s book, Black Beauty.

So the book, written in an appropriately simple style, is in part a tract intended to inculcate proper attitudes in the working classes. One of the most important of these is temperance. Black Beauty includes many examples of the evils of drink and its deleterious impact on health and earnings. In the mix too are religion, family, kindness, honesty. All of these values are embodied in the character of the cab driver Jerry Barker, who is “kind and good, and as strong for the right as John Manly”. Jerry never drinks, works hard, sets the standard when it comes to looking after horses, won’t take more payment than he is due. He is a religious man who takes the Ten Commandments seriously, doesn’t work on Sundays (“God made man, and He made horses and all the other beasts, and as soon as He had made them, He made a day of rest”), who reads his Bible. For a while it would seem that Jerry gets little reward for all his goodness when he is taken too ill to continue work as a cabby, but it all comes right in the end.

Now, I loved Jerry Barker when I was a child. I loved his kindness, the way he helped people, the way he looked after Black Beauty and his other horses, that he hated cruelty, that he didn’t think getting rich was the only thing that mattered, and the way he was prepared to stand up for his beliefs when other men laughed at him. Perhaps it’s because I went to Sunday School that I didn’t find the Bible stuff peculiar, that I didn’t find it particularly jarring. His religion seemed, after all, to be in the Gentle Jesus tradition.

“When I was a child…I understood as a child,” wrote St Paul, and it’s true that when I was a child Jesus was all gentleness and pictures you coloured in and paper streamers you made and waved when he entered Jerusalem on a donkey. There was no dwelling on hell, sin and damnation and the Passion and all the complications of the Creed, let alone grappling with Christianity’s awful history. There was no grappling with the Victorian ideologies that Christianity (some Christianity anyway) upheld either. But now I know that Anna Sewell’s book is a mouthpiece of class oppression, an apology for a long-discredited moral code, must it lose all meaning for me? Must I see Jerry Barker as a mealy-mouthed wimp drowning in his own humility? Must I sneer at the book’s sickly and sickening values?

I suppose I might if I’d fallen for them in the first place. I was never interested in the squires and ladies. They never came alive for me in the same way as Black Beauty, John Manly, Jerry Barker, the men on the cab stand. Besides, there is more to the book than reflections of the time and place in which it was written. There are, after all, far fewer ostlers and grooms left to read it, but it is still widely read. It is true that many of the values the novel upholds are out of place today, but not all. There is still a place for kindness, for an end to cruelty and ignorance, an end to violence. And there is still a place for us to pretend that a horse can tell his own story and so remind us that we are not the only living things that matter.

Picture Credit:-

Rearing Horse, late 17^th Century, Italian or French, Sculpture – Bronze, The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.