About this book
Black Beauty is born into a sunlit English meadow where his mother teaches him gentleness and dignity. But horses, like people, cannot choose their masters. Sold from home to home—from the kindly Squire Gordon to the fashion-obsessed aristocrats at Earlshall, from London cab ranks to the brutal streets of Ludgate Hill—Beauty endures bearing reins, drunken grooms, overwork, and the slow erosion of his spirit. Yet alongside the suffering, he finds moments of grace: the coachman John Manly, the cab driver Jerry Barker, and finally the boy Willie who nurses him back to health. Anna Sewell's masterwork is both a gripping autobiography of a horse and a searing indictment of how cruelty, ignorance, and social indifference destroy living creatures—and the people who serve them.
