Back to Black Beauty

A hymn to the horse, a comment on slavery, an ode to rural Norfolk: Anna Sewell’s enduringly popular novel is all this and more 200 years after its author’s birth, explains James Clarke

- James Clarke

IN 2017, a rare edition of Black Beauty went up for auction in Norfolk, in aid of the local Redwings Horse Sanctuary. The fact that the title is still cherished enough to merit its listing proved a reminder of how powerful and moving Anna Sewell’s novel remains. Initially published in the run-up to Christmas 1877, by Norwich-based publisher Jarrold and Co, the childhood favourite has never been out of print.

Told from the point of view of Black Beauty (Michael Morpurgo adopted the same storytelling device in War Horse), the book takes the reader on the horse’s life journey in both town and country. Despite the various locations in which the novel unfolds, including London, where Black Beauty works as a cab-horse, the novel is a clear tribute to the author’s connection to Norfolk. ‘Norfolk was the county of her birth, death and family heritage,’ explains Prof Adrienne E. Gavin, author of a biography of Sewell entitled Dark Horse.

Born 200 years ago, on March 30, 1820, in Great Yarmouth on the east Norfolk coast, the part of the county that would become essential to the spirit of Sewell’s iconic novel was the Bure Valley, a landscape that mixes marshland and crop fields, through which the River Bure laces its way towards the Broads. Sewell’s family went on to live in London and then Brighton, but she returned to Norfolk in the last years of her life to write Black Beauty. The author would often visit her relations in East Anglia, too, so the landscape formed a powerful thread through her life.