Black Beauty in Around the World in 80 Books

Dec 31, 2020 Daina rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I've had this children's classic book on my shelf since I was a kid myself but I have never read it until now. I wish that I had!

Sewell imparts worldly wisdom upon her young readers through the experiences of the titular narrator, a horse named Black Beauty. The horse's experiences and life lessons learned along the way teach humanity and kindness towards all.

I enjoyed Black Beauty and believe it should be required reading for young students! ...more

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May 16, 2022 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: author-disabled, author-white, europe, genre-childrens, a-reviewed, publdate-19thc, author-woman, europe-uk, z-read-gelesen-2022

Well, this was an unexpectedly melancholy read. It starts out as something that seemed to me to be an allegory for human enslavement. The horse, talking in the first person singular, tells of being bought and sold, broken in, put to work, whipped, and he is at first called 'Darkie'. The novel was published in 1877, after the Civil War in the United States of America, so I'm not sure how close to the mark I am with my surmises. At any rate, as the story went on, it became more specifically about Well, this was an unexpectedly melancholy read. It starts out as something that seemed to me to be an allegory for human enslavement. The horse, talking in the first person singular, tells of being bought and sold, broken in, put to work, whipped, and he is at first called 'Darkie'. The novel was published in 1877, after the Civil War in the United States of America, so I'm not sure how close to the mark I am with my surmises. At any rate, as the story went on, it became more specifically about the fate of horses.

It is a tale of 'and then', 'and then' which is not a story structure that altogether grabs me. The horse is with kind masters, then with bad ones, then with kind ones again, then with bad ones and so forth. Throughout he remains obedient, good-natured, willing to work hard, enduring and longsuffering. I found him not very engaging as a character.

We are now mostly not used to dealing with work animals on a daily basis and having horses around for everything to do with transport and sport is very foreign to me. So the most interesting things here were the ethnographic details: all the different vehicles (phaeton, gig, cab), the bits of kit (putting a drag on the cart when going downhill, bits, harnesses), the parts of the body (fetlock, shoe) and the food the animal ate (linseed mash, bran mash).

The novel is polemical à la Uncle Tom's Cabin. It hammers home its anti-bearing-rein and anti-cruelty message. A bearing rein is, as I learned, a very short rein that makes the horse's head stay up which was apparently all the fashion in the 19th C but which many were starting to campaign against as it is cruel. As this is so not an issue of my life in the 21st C, the repeated anti-bearing rein rants were of no more than mild interest.

What is related to the 21st C, though, is the thinking of forcing animals to do your bidding as a form of enslavement. I am reminded of Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto which in turn polemicises against human-centrism and talks of us as a human animal among non-human animals. But of course we can choose not to work animals as we have cars and bicycles.

Format: Trying to find the exact edition among the over 3,000 on GR is nigh impossible. But the Parragon edition of 1993 has endless typos, incl. "lay8ing".

Read for @bookasaurus's Diversity Reading challenge 2022: main character is not human. ...more

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