List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Anna Sewell: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Glossary of Carriages

Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions. The Autobiography of a Horse.

Appendix A: Biographical Context and Early Reception

From Mary Bayly, The Life and Letters of Mrs. Sewell (1890)

George T. Angell, “Introductory Chapter” to the American Humane Education Society Edition (1890)

Review of Black Beauty, The Nonconformist (9 January 1878)

Appendix B: Victorian Science: Questions of Animal Emotion

From Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

From Thomas Huxley, “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and Its History” (1874)

From George Romanes, Animal Intelligence (1882)

From George Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (1884)

Appendix C: Victorian Industry: Horse and Machine

From Fanny Kemble, Record of a Girlhood (1878)

From Philip Hamerton, Chapters on Animals (1874)

From W.J. Gordon, The Horse World of London (1893)

Appendix D: Animal Cruelty and Animal Rights

From Frances Power Cobbe, “The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes” (1865)

From John Duke Coleridge, The Lord Chief Justice of England [Baron Coleridge] on Vivisection (1881)

From Henry Salt, Animal Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892)

Appendix E: Bits, Bearing Reins, and Equine Management

From Henry Curling, A Lashing for the Lashers: Being an Exposition of the Cruelties Practised upon the Cab and Omnibus Horses of London (1851)

From Sir Arthur Helps, Some Talk about Animals and Their Masters (1873)

From Samuel Sidney, The Book of the Horse (1873)

From Edward Fordham Flower, Bits and Bearing Reins (1875)

From Samuel Smiles, Duty (1880)

Works Cited and Select Bibliography

About the Author

Kristen Guest is Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia.

Reviews

“No animal narrative captures the complexity of Victorian relations with animals better than Black Beauty. This edition offers an invaluable introduction to the novel and the burgeoning field of Victorian animal studies. In addition, Guest’s excerpts of primary documents plunge readers into the physical, material, and affective conditions not only of domestic animals, but also of the authors and advocates who longed to understand and protect them.” — Teresa Mangum, University of Iowa “Students, as well as the growing number of literary scholars working in animal studies, will benefit immensely from this edition. Guest places the novel in the context of disparate, but overlapping, discourses in Victorian England: animal rights and anti-vivisection, scientific analyses of animal emotion, industrial discourse that linked horses with machines, and the sentimental novel. By locating the novel within a complicated cultural milieu, Guest defends the work from those who might dismiss it as a didactic tale for children. Her final note tying the cruelty suffered by animals in this text with the ongoing mistreatment of animals in our culture demonstrates just how relevant Sewell’s text remains today.” — Monica Flegel, Lakehead University

Table of Contents

About the Author

Reviews