English novelist Anna Sewell published her book Black Beauty in 1877. The novel is written in the first person by the eponymous horse Black Beauty as an autobiographical biography, starting with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm with his mother, through his challenging time pulling taxis in London, and ending with his content retirement in the country.

He encounters several challenges along the journey and tells many tales of brutality and generosity.

Each brief chapter tells an event in Black Beauty's life that has a lesson or moral that is often connected to treating horses with love, sympathy, and understanding.

Sewell's in-depth observations and exhaustive descriptions of horse behavior give the book a lot of realism.