ABSTRACT
Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions. The Autobiography of a Horse is frequently viewed simply as a children’s novel and it has certainly infl uenced-and still infl uences-generations of youngsters. Narrated by Black Beauty, the novel begins and ends with the horse’s positive feelings for the country: the idyllic farm and the Gordon estate where he lived before eventually being sold off to work in the city, and the “pretty, low house, with a lawn and shrubbery at the front and a drive up to the door” on the farm where he expects to end his days under the benefi cent eyes of the women who have rescued him from the city and in the care of Joe Green, one of his fi rst grooms with whom he has been reunited (210). Saved from the diffi culties he experiences in the city, Black Beauty returns to the country toward the end of the novel, and he fi nds it an ideal situation equal to the one in which he lived early in his life. Feeling secure in his new, rural surroundings, Black Beauty explains, “Joe is the best and kindest of grooms. My work is easy and pleasant, and I feel my strength and spirits all coming back” (213). The new home reminds him of earlier, happier times: “often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees” (213). For Black Beauty, the country offers what some critics term an “idyllic”1 retirement: an escape from the dangers of the city and a return to his childhood home. This view helps reinforce the childlike simplicity of the narrator and provides a romanticized happy ending.2
