I'll likely be very busy for the next two weeks, so it makes sense to choose a smaller work for the next fortnightly book, and the one I have chosen is Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Sewell (1820-1878) was born into a devout Quaker family; at the age of fourteen she had an accident that severely damaged her ankles. She walked with crutches for the rest of her life, and had to use horse-drawn wagons for a wider range of distances than most people would. From this came her love of horses and concern for how they were often treated. Black Beauty itself was written in the 1870s. Sewell's health was severely declining by then, so much of the book was dictated from bed. While people have generally come to think of it as a children's book, Sewell had no such aims; her goal was to write a book for people who worked with horses, to persuade them to reevaluate their treatment of horses. And in great measure was a success in this way; many of the practices Sewell criticized began to fall out of favor in the years that followed the publication of the book. Sewell lived long enough only to see the very first wave of success for the book, but it soon became one of the bestselling books in the world, being particularly popular in the United States.
