华师小超
作者：安娜.塞维尔（Anna Sewell）1820年出生于诺福克，于1878年去世 。出于对人类虐待动物的强烈不满，他写下了《黑骏马》（Black Beauty），以说服人们对马仁慈一些。这是她身患重病的时候花了6年的时间写的，也是她写的唯一一本书。书出版后不久她就去世了，从那时以来这本书销售了3，000多万本。 本书是一部十九世纪下半叶轰动欧洲文坛的经典儿童小说。《黑骏马》在欧美常销不衰，唤醒一代又一代读者去理解所有不会说话的动物。英文简介：Black Beauty was the only book written by Anna Sewell, although its continued popularity among children, particularly girls, has justified that effort. Sewell was, remarkably, paid only twenty pounds for the book and it was published three months before her death, in 1877. However, its immediate success gave her great pleasure and she died in the knowledge that the book had indeed encouraged people to treat animals less cruelly. It is the autobiography of a horse, the ‘Black Beauty’ of the title, who narrates it. Through various owners who ask different tasks of Black Beauty, he grows and has numerous adventures. He goes from being a riding and carriage horse through being a mistreated town cab horse to eventual happiness in a secure home. Notably, the animal keeps strength and good temper throughout his suffering and the story was extremely influential as pro-animal propaganda but it is also an extremely exciting and moving children’s story.
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Blount calls Black Beauty “the first real animal novel,” “the most famous and best-loved animal book of all time,” and “perhaps the last of the moral tales” (249-50). Susan Chitty calls it “probably the most successful animal story ever written” with more than 30 million sold (7). However, she points out that the book was not written for children so much as for working-class folk who handled horses. According to Prusty, Black Beauty had a “missionary aim” to “induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.” The book was widely used as propaganda by groups seeking more humane treatment of horses and the elimination of the bearing rein; thousands of copies were given away to horse handlers and drivers in an effort to restrain abuse of work animals. The book did lead to the abolition of the bearing rein, although it was not the only propaganda in these efforts -- just the strongest one. Sewell’s writing was strongly influenced by Horace Bushnell’s “Essay on Animals” and her own close observation of the life of Victorian horses. Parsons suggests another possible source may be George MacDonald’s fantasy At the Back of the North Wind (1868-70), in which similar observations about animal treatment and human social conditions are presented in the story of Old Diamond the horse and young Diamond the boy. Sewell also learned a great deal of practical knowledge about horse driving and training from her brother Philip and from conversations with various drivers she encountered as she went about. In one such conversation, for instance, she spoke with a cabman who complained of the “Christians” who took a cab on Sundays, forcing the working class cabmen to violate the Sabbath; she put similar comments into the mouths of Jerry and his family. In addition to its missionary purpose in the area of animal abuse, Black Beauty offers several other moral messages, through Beauty’s observation of the moral natures of various humans with whom he come into contact and through overt sermonizing by several of the humans. Although, as Pronty notes, the horses themselves are cut off from any experience of divinity, there is clearly a Christian moral sensibility underlying the novel as a whole. Unlike other anti-cruelty crusaders, Sewell places the blame for abuse of cab horses, e.g., on the owners who exploit both horse and driver, rather than on the working men who perpetrate the cruel practices (Ferguson). Black Beauty’s life is a microcosm of Victorian horse experience, with every kind of rider, driver, and event occurring at some point in his life. Moira Ferguson has argued that much of the language of the novel, and some of its power, comes from its use of the language of slavery, with the horse being placed in the position of the slave. Details such as the initial description of home on a “plantation of trees,” “our master’s home” and the names given to the horses (“Black Beauty” itself, but also “Darkie,” and later names evoking his complexion). The pattern of the narrative is also like slave narratives, showing a wide variety of masters’ behaviors as, e.g., in the story of Ginger. Ginger’s resistance contrasts with Black Beauty’s acceptance of equine servitude, and reveals the uneasiness with which author and society view overt rebellion, while at the same time revealing the causes of rebellion.
