Black Beauty

The pitch

A horse tells his own life story — from a sunny meadow through kind masters, careless ones, and the brutal cab trade of Victorian London. Written to make people treat horses better, it accidentally became the book that has made animal-lovers out of children for almost 150 years.

What to know

The horse-mad kid needs no persuading; this is the original horse book, the one the pony series descend from. Beauty tells his own story, and Sewell wrote plainly on purpose, so confident grade-4 readers can manage the words. The feelings run deeper than the vocabulary. Read the content note before handing it over; Ginger’s story has been making readers cry for a hundred and fifty years.

Life when written

Anna Sewell’s England of 1877 moved entirely by horse — every cab, bus, plough, and delivery cart — so the book’s world was simply the street outside every reader’s window. Fashionable owners really did strap carriage horses’ heads painfully high with the check-rein, and working horses were used up fast and sold down the ladder, exactly as Beauty is. Sewell, an invalid who had depended on horse-drawn carriages all her life, wrote the book from her sofa in her last years; it helped turn public feeling until the cruelties she named began to disappear.