My friend’s words struck a chord in my heart for I vividly remembered how, at the age of ten, I wept when I read the part in Black Beauty where the once proud, feisty and magnificent mare Ginger is reduced to a skeletal, ill-treated beast of burden on the streets of London. Of all the books from my childhood, it was this scene in Black Beauty which was seared in my mind forever. Over sixty years later, to see my granddaughter develop a love for horses was deeply moving, and to give her a copy of Black Beauty was a joy.

The brilliance of Anna Sewell, an English Quaker born in 1820, was that she wrote Black Beauty from the perspective of the horse of that name. He speaks to the reader in the first-person. In this way Sewell takes us into the inner world of this noble creature as he observes human behaviour and witnesses both kindness and cruelty to horses in nineteenth century Britain. Originally with the full title of Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse, Anna Sewell’s book was not primarily intended for children but aimed at changing the behaviour of those who worked with horses.

It is not very well-known that Quakers were active in the embryonic movement against animal cruelty. Born in 1720, exactly one hundred years before Sewell, the American Quaker and abolitionist John Woolman, was an early proponent of kindness to animals, including horses which hauled heavy loads. When in England in 1772 to attend London Yearly Meeting in York and to advocate for the abolition of slavery, Woolman witnessed the ill-treatment of the horses pulling the carriage in which he was travelling from London. Leaving the carriage in protest, he continued his long journey on foot and died in York very soon after.

The book Writing Black Beauty is essentially the biography of a book. It begins with the childhood of Anna Sewell in a warm and caring Quaker family experiencing financially strained circumstances. Sustaining a serious and poorly managed injury as a child which left her with limited mobility, Anna Sewell learned to ride side-saddle and to drive a small carriage, and in doing so developed a deep empathy with horses.

Celia Brayfield then traces Anna Sewell’s development into an independently minded young woman. By this stage in her life Anna Sewell had become increasingly alienated from the Society of Friends due to its prevailing austerity and the restrictions it imposed on the enjoyment of literature, art and music. Yet while she ceased to be a Member of the Society of Friends, Anna Sewell carried within her the core values of Quakerism for the rest of her life.

While she never married and had children of her own, Anna Sewell worked as a teacher, and like her mother, assisted impoverished families. The mother-daughter relationship was very close, and her mother, Mary Wright Sewell, became a well-known children’s author whose books carried a strong message about kindness. It was not until Anna Sewell was fifty-one years of age and in very poor health that she began to write her one and only book, dying five months after Black Beauty was first published in 1877.

Initially the book had a very small circulation in Britain, but it began to gain popularity at a time when the movement against animal cruelty was emerging. In the United States Black Beauty was enthusiastically adopted and promoted by campaigners such as George Thorndike Angell, the founder of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. For the early animal rights movement, Black Beauty proved to be an important manifesto, the equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the movement for abolition of slavery. By 1891 over a million copies of Black Beauty had been sold in the US. With over fifty million copies published and translated into 50 languages, Black Beauty remains one of the world’s best-selling books of all time

Celia Brayfield has succeeded in placing this much-loved novel within the context of Anna Sewell’s life and times, the latter including mid-nineteenth century English Quakerism and the late nineteenth century movement to prevent cruelty to animals. Anna Sewell’s capacity for empathy was nurtured in a loving Quaker family, and the power of her book Black Beauty reminds us of the profound importance of creating the conditions that nurture empathy in all children for all God’s creatures.