Dark Horse - A Life of Anna Sewell
By Gavin, Adrienne, E.

(2004), Sutton, Stroud, pp 276, ISBN 0-7509-2838-7, £20.00

Reviewed by Andrew Stibbs, recent former Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds, UK.

Anna Sewell would have had no biography if she had not written Black Beauty , but she would still have deserved one. Adrienne Gavin's biography pays the one-book author such skilled and sympathetic attention that, like the best nineteenth-century novels, it asserts the worth, intrinsic interest, and remarkableness of any human life.

This is a meticulous biography of an admirable woman. Anna was an assiduous letter-writer and Adrienne Gavin makes good use of her correspondence and that of her relatives. She has also been ingenious and resourceful in seeking out the maximum evidence on her reticent subject, as her Bibliography and notes prove. Without ever straying into background padding, the book sets the subject's quiet life into the context of her exciting times, occasionally using such statistics as how many horses there were in Victorian England but how few people owned them. Such factual underpinning reminds us how we get only a partial and partisan view of Victorian society from novelists – even such expansive ones as Dickens or Eliot.

Anna kept no diary, so despite her thorough scholarship her biographer necessarily has to speculate about intimate features or periods of Anna's life for which there is no firm evidence. For example, Gavin supposes some unadmitted romantic attractions, a putative visit to the Great Exhibition, and what might have been discussed in Anna's (authenticated) conversations with Tennyson. She almost always qualifies these speculations with ‘surely', ‘probably', or ‘possibly', but one forgivable exception is the opening paragraph in which the biographer effectively engages our immediate sympathy by using a novelistic dramatisation of Anna's mother ‘pausing' while writing a letter to look at her dying daughter who ‘shifted slightly' before Mary ‘dipped her pen in the inkwell and continued.'

Adrienne Gavin has made Mary Sewell, Anna's mother, a continual beneficent presence in the book, which thereby becomes almost a joint biography. Mary was there at Anna's death as well as birth and they became each others' soulmate, and partner in good works. They were a matched pair of philanthropists with, their biographer judges, Mary the more imaginative and Anna fearless but more circumspect. The book tells how they promoted children's and adults' education, temperance, the rehabilitation of prisoners, and the relief of the poor and of any other local distress they could find. Their tireless and effective do-gooding was informed by the principles of their native Quakerism, though both were exploratory and eclectic in their religious reading and church-going. One of the most interesting parts of the book is its account of how each of them renounced formal membership of the Quakers (Anna was actually expelled) without losing their own faith or their network of Quaker friends.

Another fascinating section is the account of Mary's successful and enlightened teaching of Anna and her brother. She set out to teach them virtue but in a way that was ‘”stimulating, animating, affectionate [and not] depressing”' (22). She taught them obedience ‘through habit', independence but with self-restraint, responsibility but without anxiety, and knowledge about - and respect for - the natural world by observation, collection and experiment which did not involve killing. Like one of her sisters and an aunt, Mary preceded Anna as a writer, publishing educative books on nature and religion for both adults and children, with Anna eventually as effectively her editor. Adrienne Gavin quotes from Walks with Mamma, one of Mary's early books, a monosyllabic reading primer originally for Anna and Philip (20-21)., which is as strained as, but more engagingly bloodthirsty than most 20 th century reading primers.

Like 30% of her generation, Anna remained unmarried. She lived a life of ‘selflessness and charity' (146), despite being lame from childhood and increasingly incapacitated by a debilitating illness (which Adrienne Gavin suggests may have been a form of lupus). As well as her charity work and correspondence, she read (mostly newspapers and devotional books it would seem from the biography). She also rode, drove or walked whenever she was fit, kept animals (especially bees), helped to manage the domestic economy, and visited relatives for long periods.

When illness increasingly, then finally, bound her to the house and deprived her of the company of horses, Anna painstakingly pencilled her best-seller. It took her five years, on and off, but we are given few details of the composition process, presumably because few exist. She was, as ever, in the care of the indefatigable mother who was at the same time nursing her ailing husband Isaac and continuing both her philanthropy and her own bread-winning writing. Black Beauty could be seen as the continuation of Anna's good works by other means. It was intended for adults as much as for children, especially adults who worked with horses. Its admonitions also prominently included incidents cautioning against drinking, hunting, irresponsible smoking, war, ignorance, party political activity and not keeping Sunday as a day of rest, all hobby-horses of the novelist.

The values that had informed Anna's life are those which, implicitly and explicitly, permeate her famous book, and, arguably are part of the explanation for its extraordinary popularity. In Black Beauty there is propaganda against cruelty to animals, an emphasis on disciplined upbringing (which may specially endear the book to adults who buy it for children), the implication that ‘good breeding' acquired through hard work and self-restraint has more validity than that which is the product only of hereditary wealth and title, and the deeply English preference for the countryside and its ways rather than the town. As her biographer makes clear, these can be traced in Black Beauty 's creator, who, as she says, could well be one of the ‘gracious ladies' who so forthrightly and expertly remonstrate with abusers of horses in her novel. Adrienne Gavin uses many quotations from the novel as epigraphs to chapters and says:

for Anna[,] controlling herself, seeing things clearly and accepting her situation with equanimity and true faith was her determined mission (110)

This is what Black Beauty learns and advocates and it is the lesson of Anna's book, as it is of her mother's smaller-scale didactic works.

‘Black Beauty is the autobiography not only of a horse but also of Anna herself' (206). As well as the values, the events of the plot of the novel, or its plots, could also be paralleled by some features of Anna Sewell's life. Within its over-arching cyclic pattern from Arcadian infancy to Arcadian retirement it is an episodic novel, alternating dramatic events with more homiletic sections, as, presumably did Walks with Mamma. In particular, as Adrienne Gavin says, Black Beauty's abrupt moves between owners, rural and urban, reflect the Sewell family's frequent house-moves – disruptive to their philanthropic projects –forced on them by Isaac Sewell's often unsuccessful attempts to establish himself in the businesses of drapery, then banking, with some brewing, coal-trading and ship-owning on the side.

Black Beauty was published in 1877, just before Anna's death at the age of 58. After a slow start it became a rampant best-seller (and source of unscrupulous adaptation) largely, at first, because campaigners against animal cruelty, especially in the U.S.A., bought it for free distribution, in one case as ‘The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Horse'. Adrienne Gavin's account of the book's publication history is the one part of the book that is hard-going, but only because, quite properly, it exhaustively details its unparalleled runaway and continuing success.

The author's restrained and moving account of Anna's death, based on the aged but ever-active Mary's account, acts almost as an epilogue to the book, as does the brief coda on the recent destruction of the Sewell graves.

The book is well produced with a family tree, photographs and source list, is clearly written, and beautifully judged in its contents. It is an engaging, dignifying, persuasive, and salutary life of a woman whose virtues might otherwise seem strange and unattractive to readers in our brasher, competitive and celebrity-centred culture.

Andrew Stibbs