Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions. The Autobiography of a Horse. Translated from the Original Equine.

SEWELL, Anna.

Item Number: 143892

London: Jarrold and Sons, 1887.

First edition of Sewell’s pioneering work which brought animal welfare to the fore, with one million copies in circulation in the United States two years after its publication. Octavo, original publisher’s gilt and black stamped green cloth, wood-engraved frontispiece by C. Hewitt, 8 pp. of publisher’s advertisements at end. In Carter’s “C” binding, with a small gilt horse’s head enclosed within a one-inch circle, looking to the left, as is virtually always found (Carter, More Binding Variants, 37-38). In near fine condition with scattered foxing primarily to the pages edges and first few pages. Contemporary ownership inscription to the front free endpaper. Housed in a custom full morocco clamshell box by Patron. An exceptional unrestored example of this scarce work.

Sewell “was told in 1871 that she had only 18 months to live; by the end of that year she had begun Black Beauty, her only book, and five years later she was still alive and at work on it.” Sewell had great difficulty in finding a publisher and sales at first were slow. “She lived to see the book published, but died a few months later, before she could know of its huge success… Black Beauty was the most celebrated animal story of the 19th century, an account of a horse’s experiences at the hands of many owners… The book revived the ‘animal biography,’ a genre popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries but which had been dormant for half a century” (Carpenter & Prichard, 66, 479).