Black Beauty tells his own story, from a happy colthood on an English farm to the hard life of a London cab horse, and back to kindness at the end. Through…
About the recording
Author
Anna Sewell
Read by
Judith Brown, Kristin LeMoine, Fox in the Stars and 15 other readers
Black Beauty tells his own story, from a happy colthood on an English farm to the hard life of a London cab horse, and back to kindness at the end. Through his eyes, and those of the fiery mare Ginger and his other companions, we see what careless and cruel handling does to horses, the bearing rein that holds the head painfully high, overwork, bad roads and drunken drivers, set against grooms and owners who treat animals with patience. It is a story for children and a plea to every adult who owns a horse.
Context and significance
Anna Sewell, an invalid who depended on horse-drawn carriages, wrote her only novel in the last years of her life; it was published in 1877, months before she died, and helped to change how working horses were treated. Nineteen LibriVox volunteers read its forty-nine short chapters, about six hours.
This is a LibriVox recording, read by volunteers and dedicated to the public domain; its audio files are kept by the Internet Archive, which plays and serves them here. Public-domain status differs from country to country, so check the law where you live before republishing it. Do you hold rights in this work? Request its removal
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