Black Beauty (100 Copy Limited Edition)

Front Cover
Engage Books, Sep 30, 2019 - Young Adult Fiction - 164 pages

Black Beauty begins with a young horse's carefree days as a colt on an English farm with his mother, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country. Along the way, he meets with many hardships and recounts many tales of cruelty and kindness. Each short chapter recounts an incident in Black Beauty's life containing a lesson or moral typically related to the kindness, sympathy, and understanding of horses.

While forthrightly teaching animal welfare, Black Beauty also teaches how to treat people with kindness, sympathy, and respect. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time.

This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

Other editions - View all

About the author (2019)

Anna Sewell, March 30, 1820 - April 25, 1878 Anna Sewell was on March 30, 1820 in Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. She was raised a Quaker by her father a bank manager and her mother, a children's novelist. At the age of fourteen, Sewell hurt her knee during a fall and the injury never healed right. Even though she could not walk well, she could still ride horses and drive a horse drawn buggy. It was this form of freedom that sparked her concern for the welfare of horses. She wrote "Black Beauty" when she was in her fifties, but died a year after it was published in 1877. While she never earned much from the book while she was alive, after her death, the novel snowballed into a something extraordinary. The book was about the abuses horses sustained in their lifetimes, but was told from the unique viewpoint of the horse. Even though the book was intended for children, it impacted all generations and caused everyone who read it to take a look at the inhumane treatment horses received. In the one hundred plus years since "Black Beauty" had been published, over 30 million copies have been printed. At least eight motion pictures have been made based on the novel and it is a well known children's classic. Anna Sewell died on April 25, 1878 in Old Catton, Norfolk.

Bibliographic information