Black Beauty Themes

Black Beauty Themes

Man and the Natural World

This is a no-brainer: If you had to pick a primary focus for this book, it would be the relationship between humans and animals. Black Beauty explores this relationship in all of its complexity, fr...

Suffering

Life as a horse isn't easy. Life as a horse in Victorian England? Really not easy. With hardship and horror waiting around the corner every time you're sold to a new master, it's hard to ever feel...

Principles

It's hard to miss the life-lessons Black Beauty tries to teach us—they're often not particularly subtle. Values, morals, and principles are repeatedly discussed here, and when they're not discuss...

Religion

When reading Black Beauty, it's easy to tell that Anna Sewell is a big fan of religion. Church is treated as an integral part of life for some of the humans in the story, and Jerry Barker's interlu...

Language and Communication

So you've probably figured out by now that having a horse for a narrator isn't exactly ordinary. Communication is a big theme in Black Beauty for this very reason. Even though Beauty can tell us hi...

Power

Something Black Beauty reminds us about time and again is that its equine protagonist has basically no control over his own life. It might seem unusual to have an entire story about someone who is...

Compassion and Love

If there's one theme that stands out in Black Beauty amid the hardships of life as a working horse, it's the theme of compassion and love. When you have no control over your fate, and when you have...

Courage

Apart from being a compelling argument against animal cruelty, Black Beauty is also just a really great story, thanks mostly to the appeal of its main character. One of Beauty's defining traits is...