Anna Sewell tells the whole story from inside the horse, from a peaceful meadow through years of harder and harder owners, and dedicated it to her own mother. That narrator's-eye view of being worked, sold, and mistreated gives eight to twelve year olds a genuinely different vantage point on kindness and cruelty than most books manage.
About this book
First published 1877 · Anna Sewell's only book · Written from her sickbed · Helped end the bearing rein
Anna Sewell wrote her only book in the last years of her life, housebound and in poor health after a fall in her youth had left her lame. She worked at it slowly between about 1871 and 1877, dictating passages to her mother and writing others in pencil for her mother to copy out. Her aim was plain, and she stated it herself: to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses. She told the whole story from the horse's own point of view.
The book sold quickly, and its effect went well beyond reading. Its picture of the bearing rein, a strap that forced a carriage horse to hold its head painfully high for the sake of fashion, helped turn public feeling against the practice and gave momentum to the animal welfare movement in Britain and the United States. Sewell lived just long enough to see it succeed, and died five months after publication, in April 1878.
The copy on this shelf is the full original text.
Chapters
A long one: read it a chapter a night.
Public domain. Source text via Project Gutenberg, PG boilerplate removed. View the source edition