Black Beauty

An Apple Books Classic edition.

With Black Beauty, author Anna Sewell hoped to make people care about the cruel abuses that cab horses were suffering—bought and sold, whipped, and worked to exhaustion. Sewell tells the story from the perspective of Beauty, a horse who lived an idyllic life on a farm in the English countryside until he was sold and forced to pull cabs in London. In this way, she invites us to empathize with her animal hero.

Black Beauty did, in fact, change hearts and minds. Shortly after its publication in 1877, it became illegal to use bearing reins, which were designed to hold a horse’s head at a painful, unnatural angle. Almost 150 years later, Sewell’s classic has become one of the best-selling books of all time.