In the Library
Black Beauty
Anna Sewell, 1877
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 49
- Length
- Length 59k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
Buck's ordeal under cruel and kind masters mirrors Black Beauty's own passage from meadow to city, both animal narrators testing what devotion survives mistreatment.
£1.99
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sewell's early readers called Black Beauty the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the horse, and both novels use a captive protagonist's suffering to push readers toward real reform.
£1.99
White Fang
Jack London
White Fang's journey from a brutal owner to a gentle one retraces Black Beauty's arc in reverse, both narrated entirely from the animal's own point of view.
£1.99
About the book
A black colt with a white star on his forehead grazes in a meadow in Victorian England, learns the bit and harness from kind hands, and begins the long descent through owners careful and cruel that will define his life. Anna Sewell wrote this novel from her invalid's couch in the last years of her life, finishing it in 1877 a few months before her death, the only book she would publish. Black Beauty narrates his own life in the first person, from foal to cab horse, passing through the hands of squires, drunks, livery stables, and London's pitiless traffic. The book did what no pamphlet had managed: it ended the cruel bearing-rein and shamed a nation into kindness. The horse speaks. The century listens.