Anna Sewell

British · 1820 to 1878

Born on March 30, 1820, at 26 Church Plain in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, to Isaac Sewell, a draper, and Mary Wright Sewell, a children's author and devout Quaker, Anna Sewell was raised in straitened circumstances when her father's businesses repeatedly failed. The family moved to London and then to the village of Stoke Newington, where she kept rabbits and chickens in a coach-house garden and was taught at home by her mother. At fourteen, running home from school in the rain, she slipped on wet leaves, sprained an ankle that would not heal, and was crippled for the rest of her life. Walking was painful; she relied on horses to get about, and from those years came the close attentive observation of the animals that would shape her single book. The family settled in Brighton in 1836 and later in Norfolk. She never married, lived always with her parents, edited her mother's books, and worked alongside her in charity for the working poor. From 1871, increasingly bedridden with what her doctors called tuberculosis and hepatitis, she wrote Black Beauty (1877) in pencil on scraps, her mother often transcribing as she dictated. Subtitled The Autobiography of a Horse, the book traces a single animal from a Norfolk meadow through London cab-work, with the explicit aim of teaching kindness to those who labour with horses. It sold twelve thousand copies in its first year. She lived just long enough to know it. She died of heart disease on April 25, 1878, at Old Catton near Norwich, aged fifty-eight, and is buried in the Quaker burial ground at Lammas.