Full Description
Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty is a classic work of children's literature and an important text in the fields of Victorian studies and animal studies. Writing to "induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses," Sewell realistically documents the working conditions of Black Beauty, who moves down the social scale from a rural carriage horse to a delivery horse in London. Sewell makes visible and tangible the experience of animals who were often treated as if they were machines. Though she died shortly after it was published, Sewell's book contributed significantly to late nineteenth-century campaigns for humane treatment of horses and remains a seminal anti-cruelty text today.
The Broadview Press edition reproduces the first edition of 1877, restoring material often abridged in other modern editions. Appendices include materials on contemporary animal-rights movements, "equine management," and Victorian understandings of animal emotions.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Anna Sewell: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Glossary of Carriages
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions. The Autobiography of a Horse.
Appendix A: Biographical Context and Early Reception
From Mary Bayly, The Life and Letters of Mrs. Sewell (1890)
George T. Angell, "Introductory Chapter" to the American Humane Education Society Edition (1890)
Review of Black Beauty, The Nonconformist (9 January 1878)
Appendix B: Victorian Science: Questions of Animal Emotion
From Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
From Thomas Huxley, "On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and Its History" (1874)
From George Romanes, Animal Intelligence (1882)
From George Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (1884)
Appendix C: Victorian Industry: Horse and Machine
From Fanny Kemble, Record of a Girlhood (1878)
From Philip Hamerton, Chapters on Animals (1874)
From W.J. Gordon, The Horse World of London (1893)
Appendix D: Animal Cruelty and Animal Rights
From Frances Power Cobbe, "The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes" (1865)
From John Duke Coleridge, The Lord Chief Justice of England [Baron Coleridge] on Vivisection (1881)
From Henry Salt, Animal Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892)
Appendix E: Bits, Bearing Reins, and Equine Management
From Henry Curling, A Lashing for the Lashers: Being an Exposition of the Cruelties Practised upon the Cab and Omnibus Horses of London (1851)
From Sir Arthur Helps, Some Talk about Animals and Their Masters (1873)
From Samuel Sidney, The Book of the Horse (1873)
From Edward Fordham Flower, Bits and Bearing Reins (1875)
From Samuel Smiles, Duty (1880)
Works Cited and Select Bibliography
