Black Beauty

Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector’s Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector’s Library are books to love and treasure. This edition of Black Beauty features illustrations by Cecil Aldin and an afterword by author and conservationist Lauren St. John.

Black Beauty enjoys a carefree upbringing in a pleasant meadow with his mother, where his gentle first master trains him well – until he is reluctantly forced to sell him. Through a long and varied life, Black Beauty passes from one owner to the next; some treat him well, others are so cruel that they inflict lasting damage.

Anna Sewell’s biographical novel about a horse is one of the bestselling books of all time, and her depiction of Victorian society’s harsh treatment of animals inspired significant changes to animal welfare in both the UK and America.

Review

Laced with generous doses of moral virtue . . . Black Beauty has more integrity and decency than the average human -- Justine Hankins, the Guardian

Sewell’s novel should be regarded as a work of protest literature, the forerunner less of Lassie or the novels of Christine Pullein-Thompson than of today’s animal rights activism and anti-hunting lobby ― Telegraph

With vivid detail and simple, yet lyrical, prose, Black Beauty describes both the cruelty and kindness that an ebony-coloured horse experiences through his lifetime ― NPR

About the Author

Anna Sewell was born in 1820 into a Quaker family whose respect for horses was out of step with the common view of the time, that animals should be worked until they dropped. Disabled in a fall aged 14, Anna lived all her life with her parents but became an expert carriage driver and, as editor and stern critic, helped her mother, Mary Wright Sewell, become a successful author of evangelical children's books. Anna wrote Black Beauty, her only book, in the last years of her life, as a plea for more humane treatment of horses. She died in 1878, a year after the novel was published to wide acclaim.