In an interview on Books that Changed the World

Your first book is Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.

I find it odd that people don’t realise how revolutionary this book is.

It was the first book that gave consciousness and personality to an animal which is the horse, Black Beauty. It is narrated in the first person and is supposedly his autobiography.  Black Beauty starts off life with a loving mother and great happiness and a good owner. Then he gets sold from one person to another and it is a terrible tragic story of the erosion of happiness and health, until finally, when broken-down and near death from ill-treatment, he is rescued.

So it is a story of paradise lost, and regained. 

What was the reaction to the book at the time?

Well, it really dramatised the animal rights movement. People forget that William Wilberforce, who abolished the slave trade, also founded the RSPCA. The animal rights movement had been going for a generation, but it was Black Beauty that made the suffering of animals immediate and vivid as only imaginative literature can do. To this day there are several horses’ drinking fountains that were erected because the public were so horrified by the cruelty to animals. So it really was the novel that changed how people saw another species. It made us bigger as human beings because the old medieval idea that man was immeasurably distinct from and superior to beasts began to crumble.

Millions of children still read this book and I think it is important as a formative work of literature. Psychopaths always start off by being cruel to animals and then progress to humans, so if you learn that you should be kind to animals you are much more likely to be kind to humans.

In an interview on Books for Teenagers

One more book to go.

I have to go with Black Beauty. It’s very tough for me to read, because of the cruelty. I can’t stand cruelty. I don’t understand it, I will never understand it. Never in a million years. But if you want to take my illness and you want to equate it with anything, you can equate it with Black Beauty.

Do you want to explain?

There are times that he is loved and admired, and times when he is beaten and abused. Then he’s loved and admired again, and then beaten and abused. In his head, in his heart, he always remembers the times he’s loved and admired and in the end, of course, he’s given his freedom and he’s loved and admired. But he’s got so much heart, and so much will.

I was speaking at a school once and the principal came up to me at lunch and she said, “At the end of the day, I’d like you to meet a little fourth grader.” And this little girl came shuffling up to me and she said, “I have JRA too, but I didn’t know that when I grew up I could have a career and I could have children. And you have both! And now I know I can”. That’s so terrific. She actually runs a zoo from her bed, via Facebook. She’s doing neat things. But this is a disastrous disease.

And it’s really a disease of ups and downs – that’s why it’s like Black Beauty?

Yes. I hate the parts where he’s not treated well. It just reminds me of the really, really bad times. But it was only after I was putting this list together that these things dawned on me. I never thought about them before. That’s not why I read the books. I read them because I loved them. But in going over them I was thinking, “Oh, my gosh, Jane Eyre was a child with a problem; Black Beauty was a horse that was abused; Pollyanna was a little girl that had to come through all this stuff; Oliver Twist got put in an orphanage by mistake; and the little boy in Red Dory had to look from the fish’s point of view about pain, and what it was like to fight to live”.

In an interview on the Equestrian Life

I presume Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was a childhood favourite.

Yes, my mother read this to me as a bedtime story. As a horsey young girl, it was a wonderful book to have read to you. It was written in 1877, in the first person – which was ground-breaking at the time. Basically it is the memoir of a horse called Black Beauty, who starts off as a happy young colt on a farm then gets sold to pull cabs in London and isn’t treated very well, but finally ends up in a happy retirement.

The book went on to become one of the bestselling books of all time, selling 50 million copies worldwide. What effect did it have on you when you read it?

You fall in love with him at the start of the book, then there is a pulling of heartstrings when he is so badly treated, and then happiness when it turns out alright at the end.

Anna Sewell wrote the novel in order to “induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses”. Because of the way she portrayed the plight of working horses, many people were concerned about their welfare and much was done to improve their situation.

Yes, and that was a very good thing.