“Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is a classic work of children’s literature and an important text in the fields of Victorian studies and animal studies. Writing to ‘induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses,’ Sewell realistically documents the working conditions of Black Beauty, who moves down the social scale from a rural carriage horse to a delivery horse in London. Sewell makes visible and tangible the experience of animals who were often treated as if they were machines. Though she died shortly after it was published, Sewell’s book contributed significantly to late nineteenth-century campaigns for humane treatment of horses and remains a seminal anti-cruelty text today.”