Writing Black Beauty E-Book

Celia Brayfield

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 401

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Black Beauty is a novel that changed our world. Intended to 'induce kindness' in a Victorian audience who relied on horses for transport, travel and power, it remains a dearly loved children's classic. Writing Black Beauty is the story of the remarkable woman who wrote this phenomenal book. Born in 1820 to a young Quaker couple, Anna Sewell grew up in poverty in London. She was 14 when she fell and injured her ankle, leaving her permanently disabled. Rejecting the limitations that Victorian society forced on disabled people, she developed an extraordinary empathy with horses, learning to ride side-saddle and drive a small carriage. Rebellious and independent-minded, Anna left the Quaker movement as a young woman but remained close friends with the women writers and abolitionists who had been empowered by its liberal principles. It was not until she became terminally ill, aged 51, that she wrote her own book. It was published in 1877, but Anna tragically died just five months later. After modest success in Britain, Black Beauty was taken up by American activist George Thorndike Angell, who made it one of the bestselling novels of all time. Using newly discovered archive material, Celia Brayfield shows how Anna Sewell developed the extraordinary resilience to rouse the conscience of Victorian Britain and make her mark upon the world.

Leseprobe

This book is offered in thanks for the work and inspiration of Mary-Joy Langdon

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Celia Brayfield, 2023

The right of Celia Brayfield to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 489 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Family Tree

Introduction

1 My Little Darling (1820–22)

2 Hell for Animals (1822–24)

3 ‘I Think We Were Exceedingly Happy’ (1824–32)

4 Troubled Waters (1832–36)

5 ‘I Am Very Miserable’ (1836–46)

6 No Idle Passing Patronage (1837–61)

7 ‘She Consciously Studied for Black Beauty’ (1846–56)

8 ‘This Will Do’ (1857–67)

9 The Most Popular Novel of Our Day (1852–65)

10 ‘The Very Spot for Authorship’ (1858–66)

11 ‘You Have Been Doing Angels’ Work’ (1867–77)

12 ‘At Last the Book Has Come to Me’ (1884–85)

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book explores the slow acceptance of the idea that cruelty to animals is wrong, an idea which at the time of writing is not held universally even in societies that see themselves as advanced. The story begins over 200 years ago, in England, at a time when actions which are now illegal in many countries happened every day. The attitudes that condoned and even promoted this everyday abuse seem incomprehensible to us now. In telling this story, I, like Anna Sewell, wanted to reach a wide audience, so I have not included extensive details of the cruelty that was once freely practised, particularly by vivisectionists. I judged it necessary to include some distressing material, however, because not to suggest the need for activism would have been historically inaccurate.

Content Warning

If you are sensitive to descriptions of cruelty to animals, I suggest that you do not read the descriptions of bull-baiting and the Stamford Bull Run in Chapter 2, pages 37–9, or the accounts of cruelty in the United States in Chapter 9, pages 157–8.

Some of the quotes within this book use language that would be considered inappropriate today but was commonplace at the time. They are reproduced here for historical record.

THE WRIGHT/SEWELL/STICKNEY FAMILY TREE

INTRODUCTION

On a raw spring day in 1871 a doctor visited The White House in the Norfolk village of Old Catton. He drove out in a small carriage along an unmade country road between water meadows and fields that were barely green with the new wheat. The land in all directions stretched away to the horizon with no hills to break the vista, challenge his horse or protect them from the biting wind.

His patient was Miss Anna Sewell, a character noted in the community for her sweet nature and air of serenity. She was the daughter of a well-known writer, her family had lived in the area for generations and most of them were Quakers. She had been disabled since childhood as a result of a foot injury, but recently she had been suffering from dizziness and fainting, and now she had severe abdominal pain that was getting worse. None of the treatment he had prescribed had helped. ‘A troublesome case,’ he admitted, with that carefully neutral face that spoke more than words ever could.

After he had left the bright white bedroom, where a vase of flowers and a few books were the only decorations, Anna’s mother, an energetic, silver-haired woman of 75, asked his honest opinion about the prognosis. He told her that her daughter would be dead within eighteen months.

Pain and doctors had been Anna Sewell’s constant companions since her early teens, since the day she ran home from school in the rain, slipped on some wet leaves and fell. She injured her ankle badly and overnight was changed from an athletic, outgoing girl into a woman living with permanently compromised health. This time, though, the pain was different, and Anna knew her body well enough to see through her mother’s optimistic smile and the doctor’s tactful opinion and recognise that now her life was limited.

There was one thing Anna wanted to do before she died, and that was to write something. Writing was almost her family business. Her mother, Mary Sewell, was a bestselling author of verse novels. One of her aunts had become famous for her natural history books, which even Queen Victoria had admired. Another close relative had seized the whole country’s imagination with a series of ‘conduct’ books for women, which had really captured the mood of a nation ruled by a young queen. Another aunt had just started her career as a novelist, although she was well over 70 years of age.

Most of the visitors to the family home were her mother’s writer friends and Anna herself had been her mother’s editor and collaborator since the beginning of her writing career. Each day of the life that mother and daughter shared, from a morning reading of poetry or an essay to the word games they played in the evening, was saturated with literature. Nothing would have been more natural than for her to start writing.

At first, she was not sure that her notes and sketches would become a book. She was an astute critic of other people’s work and not sure she could live up to her own standards, but that winter, in between making dolls and Christmas boxes for the village children, she began putting her thoughts down on paper. She also started keeping a journal, in which she noted, ‘I am writing the life of a horse.’1

As her strength waned, her life contracted. With calm acceptance fostered by her Christian faith, she recognised that she would never again be able to ride, never drive her pony chaise, never visit her beehives. Soon she could not even walk as far as the garden gate. She was in so much pain that she could not sleep and, lying in bed or on a sofa in the sitting room, she thought back over her life.

She recalled the weary cab horses she had seen in London as a child, her grandfather’s honest farm horses on which she had learned to ride, the carriage horses owned by the aristocratic visitors to the smart towns of Brighton and Bath, beautifully turned out but tortured until their mouths were bleeding by a cruel piece of harness called the bearing rein.

She thought of her own horses and remembered with gratitude how her world had opened up because of them. Although she often could not walk, her horses had made it possible for her to live a rich and fulfilling life. She could look back on happy times with family and friends, a teaching career in which she had been valued and long hours enjoying nature, all possible because of her horses. Now that she could no longer drive, she was forced to rehome her little grey pony, the sweet creature who had taken Anna everywhere but knew her own mind when it came to the stony streets of Norwich. Now the highlight of Anna’s week was Sunday, when her brother Philip drove over with some of his large family and their restless mare, Bessie, whose cleverness provided him with entertaining stories for the children.

The doctor’s prognosis proved too pessimistic and, after two years, Anna recovered a little and the pain became less overwhelming. With those celebrated women writers among her close relatives, she was at first reluctant to claim that her fragmentary sketches were a book, but gradually her writing took on that shape and she had the confidence tell her journal: ‘From time to time I have, as I was able, been writing what I think will turn out a little book, it’s special aim being to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses.’

Her recovery was short-lived and she began to grow steadily weaker, sometimes able to write in pencil on little pieces of paper but often with only enough strength to dictate to her mother. Now, however, the work had a momentum of its own and she felt compelled to finish it.

For many years she had been her mother’s editor and first reader, collaborating on the succession of popular verse novels that had made her an author of international renown. Now their roles were reversed, and Mary Sewell was the editor who transcribed her daughter’s stories into a manuscript. From her bedroom, Anna could see the natural world that gave her so much delight: the wild birds pecking at a feeder on the tree in the garden, the deer in the park of the great country estate in the distance. From her balcony, she could watch the horses on the street outside and talk to their owners, asking about their lives ‘because I am anxious, if I can, to present their true conditions and their great difficulties, in a correct and telling manner’.2

Four more years passed. By the time the book was finished, Anna was bedridden, losing weight and suffering a new pain in her back from pressure sores. By now a nurse had joined the household to help care for her. Her mother took the manuscript to her own publishers, Jarrold & Sons, in London and asked them to consider ‘This little book of my daughter’s’. They offered £20 for the copyright, which Mary advised Anna to accept. The proofs arrived in August 1877 and Anna’s last journal entry about the book mentions ‘very nice type’.

By November, when Black Beauty: His Grooms & Companions – the Autobiography of a Horse Translated from the Original Equine was published, Anna had a chest infection but was almost too weak to cough. She sent copies of the book to her family at Christmas. ‘Step by step, day by day, the dear life seems to be slipping away,’ wrote her mother to a friend in April 1878.3 A few days later, at about seven in the morning, the nurse called Mary to Anna’s bedside. ‘I am not going yet, I am so strong,’ her daughter assured her. Four hours later, Anna asked her mother and brother to pray, then said, ‘I am quite ready’, before taking her last few breaths.4

Her final resting place was with her ancestors in the Quaker burial ground in the next village of Lamas. Her grieving mother was infuriated when the undertaker’s carriage arrived drawn by horses harnessed with bearing reins. She made them remove these cruel devices. In a few more years, thanks to her daughter’s work, they would be illegal.

There was no hint then of what Black Beauty would become. In Victorian England, animal welfare was a minority interest entertained mostly by those who could afford it, while the majority of the population, living in poverty, had to choose between the welfare of their animals and their own survival. A few thousand copies of the book sold in the first year. Driven by grief, Mary Sewell demanded that Jarrold’s try harder and market the book through the urban missionaries and animal welfare groups, notably the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).

It was not until thirteen years later that a crusading American activist, George Thorndike Angell, seized upon the book as the weapon that his arsenal of persuasive publishing had been waiting for. He launched a new edition of Black Beauty on the world and it finally seized the imagination of millions and became one of the bestselling books of all time.

1

MY LITTLE DARLING (1820−22)

Anna Sewell did not have an easy start in life. She was born on 30 March 1820 in a tiny, two-room house close to the twelfth-century church of St Nicholas, in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, which was then a huge, bustling city, one of the greatest sea ports in Europe. The house, 25 Church Plain, is now protected by Grade II listing and has been embellished with a fake half-timbered façade with a painted inscription over the door identifying it as the famous author’s birthplace. It dates from the seventeenth century and at the time of Anna’s birth was a shabby little cottage squeezed between the ancient church and almshouses for ‘decayed fishermen’.

Her mother Mary, a farmer’s daughter who had married a young shopkeeper, had moved into this miniature home with determined optimism, saying it was ‘very diminutive … but large enough to be happy in; able to take in a friend and enter on my first experience of housekeeping’.1

Mary recalls being immediately delighted by her daughter. ‘On the thirtieth of March the little stranger came,’ she wrote later. ‘An unclouded blessing – for fifty-eight years the perennial joy of my life.’2 The days of newborn bliss ended swiftly when Anna’s father, Isaac, came home from his draper’s shop to announce that he and his partner had been ‘over-reached in business’3 and he had to look for another job. Isaac was the son of a wealthy grocer, William Sewell, one of Yarmouth’s most prominent citizens.

The town was one of the most prosperous places in England, the centre of the fishing industry on the east coast and an important supply port for the Royal Navy. The whole country was at that time enjoying an economic boom after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, Isaac’s shop had struggled. He had been forced out of the business by his commercial partner and now the young couple had to give up their home. While Isaac looked for a new business, Mary Sewell dressed her tiny daughter in the baby clothes she had hand-sewn herself and went back to the family farm at Buxton, an inland village 3 miles north of Norwich, a place which would be a second home to them both throughout their lives.

Mary Sewell had been a very reluctant bride and this setback only confirmed her misgivings about her husband. This failure was to be the first of many as Isaac demonstrated again and again that he had inherited nothing of his father’s business acumen. William Sewell took exceptional interest in the education of Yarmouth’s young men, including his own sons, and enrolled them in a Demonsthenian Society, which met every year for a reading of the members’ essays.

Despite their father ‘promoting in every way their intellectual studies’,4 both Isaac and his brother, also named William, proved consistently unwise, as if ‘led by some unlucky genius’.5 Some of Isaac’s decisions were astonishingly wrong-headed, yet Mary, having committed herself to the marriage, never recorded a critical word about him, insisting that ‘a kinder husband or better father could rarely be found’.6 She was a relentless optimist, determined to see the best in everything and everyone, a mindset that would shape her daughter’s life as well as her own. Reading the body of writing in which she recorded her life, it is clear that her memories are gilded with such a glow of positivity that one sometimes suspects a much darker reality underneath. She still had a genuine sympathy for her husband’s struggles, later stating her belief that ‘women should cultivate a spirit of great sympathy with men, who have to face the world and fight its battles’.7

Isaac Sewell had first proposed to her in the summer of 1815, when she was rising 18. She caught his eye during the stupendous street party staged in Yarmouth to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, when he and Mary’s brother John worked together in the team of stewards charged with organising the crowds. The day began with a river pageant and a street procession, after which 8,000 people sat down at long tables on the quayside for a meal of beef, beer and plum pudding. William Sewell, Isaac’s father, proposed toasts to the health of the Prince Regent, good fishing and death to all tyrants. The crowds were guided to the long golden beach to be entertained by donkey races and finally, as the summer evening drew in, a huge bonfire on which Bonaparte was burned in effigy until his head, packed with gunpowder, exploded.

After these spectacular festivities were over, Isaac Sewell tentatively suggested to Mary that he might be ‘taken into her good books’, an honour which she immediately declined: ‘There was no spark upon the tinder.’8 Isaac then moved to London, to learn the financial side of the cloth industry in the offices of a textile company, and Mary Wright, as she then was, continued to enjoy the life of a bookish, romantic girl, daughter of a prosperous Norfolk farmer, surrounded by loving siblings and without a care in the world.

The two families, the Wrights and the Sewells, already knew each other as they were both prominent in the Quaker community in Norfolk. Understanding Anna Sewell herself and the story of her life means understanding not only the beliefs of this Protestant faith group at that time but also the dynamics of the far-reaching and powerful Quaker network. William Sewell senior was the Elder of the Yarmouth meeting and had once censured Mary’s mother for bringing all four of her young daughters to the meeting house in capes with swansdown trimming, going against the essential Quaker tenet of plainness in everything. Although Anna was to rebel against many Quaker customs and, in time, both she and her mother were to leave the movement, it would remain a dominant influence in their lives.

The Wrights could trace their ancestry back to the very first Quakers, who had followed the movement’s founder, George Fox, a weaver whose spiritual vision led him to look for ways to express his Christian faith outside the practice of the Church of England in the late seventeenth century. At first they were persecuted, leading many Quakers to immigrate to America, but by Anna Sewell’s time they were an accepted Nonconformist group. Many of those who remained in England had become prominent and wealthy citizens. The movement had settled in Norfolk and opened its first meeting house in Norwich. By the time Anna Sewell was born, the Norfolk Quakers were mostly ordinary folk distinguished by their ethical conduct and hard work. The Norwich meeting, however, included some of the richest families in England and also numbered among them some of the most famous women of the time. Within Britain’s network of the wealthy elite, the ‘solar-system’ of successful Quakers formed a tightly knit inner circle.9 Anna Sewell’s family farm was only a few miles from Earlham Hall, the grand seat of the Gurney family, wealthy Quakers who had moved from farming to the wool trade and then into banking. They were such a byword for prosperity that the phrase ‘as rich as the Gurneys’ appears in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Trial by Jury (1870). A Gurney daughter, Elizabeth Fry, had married another banker and, at the time Anna Sewell was born, had become a national heroine for her campaigns for prison reform and social work.

Elizabeth Fry was one of many Quaker women whose confidence in public life had been fostered by the principle of equality within the movement. Girls and boys received the same education and from its earliest days the movement had encouraged women to speak at meetings. It was a Quaker woman whom Dr Johnson derided in his often-quoted observation that ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ However much outsiders scoffed, Mary and Anna Sewell both grew up with the benefit of a community that promoted women’s equality in real terms, and knew Elizabeth Fry as a renowned reformer and popular orator who drew audiences of thousands to her lectures.

‘Quaker’ was a nickname; the movement’s proper name was, and still is, the Society of Friends. They did not believe in religious institutions or ritual worship and the meeting was their shared expression of belief. On Sundays they gathered in the graceful, unadorned buildings, which can still be seen in many English towns and villages, to share personal spiritual experience in silence, a custom that had many of the elements of meditation.

For children, of course, it was intolerable to sit in silence for two hours. The teenage Anna Sewell simply dismissed meetings as ‘useless’ and, by her 20s, had dropped out of attending them. Her mother, as a girl, had learned banned novels by heart to entertain herself during meetings.

The larger meeting houses, including the original building at Goat’s Lane in Norwich, held quarterly and annual events which drew people from far and wide to hear celebrated preachers. ‘Goat’s’, as the light-minded Gurney girls called it,10 was a place where Mary, and later Anna, would undoubtedly have heard Elizabeth Fry as well as the abolitionist writer Amelia Opie giving lectures. These meetings also brought the community elders together to discuss problem cases among them. Regrettably, these included Anna’s father, Isaac Sewell, and, before him, Mary’s father, John Wright.

When they met, Mary and Isaac had been of equal social status, both the children of wealthy community leaders. That was soon to change, as Mary’s father made a number of bad investments with his younger brother, Richard, and also fell victim to a swindler. His bad luck culminated in an investment in a steam ship on the river at Yarmouth which blew up in 1817, killing thirteen people in front of the horrified crowds on the riverbank.11 John Wright acted honourably as the Quaker community would have expected and personally compensated all the families whose loved ones had been lost in the explosion, which left him almost destitute. The remainder of the wider family fortune, a large farm at Buxton, had already been settled on Mary’s brother, also called John, rather than her wayward father, and it was to a rented cottage on that land that the elder John Wright, with his four daughters and wife, went to live. The girls could no longer expect a life of leisure, ladylike pastimes and good works before marriage. They had to find jobs and almost the only positions for which they were suited were as teachers or governesses. Their exceptional Quaker education had at least qualified them for that, but it was ‘a great descent in the social scale’.12

Mary’s sister Elizabeth, to whom she was closest among her siblings, was taken on as a governess by Isaac Sewell’s older sister, a move typical of the realistic support of a Quaker community but one which put the Sewells in the Wrights’ debt and created a link of obligation between them. Anna, the oldest sister, was given a position by another Quaker family and Mary went to work as an assistant at a school in Essex. Her duties included teaching handwriting, which she was good at, and mathematics, at which she was not good at all and had to take extra tuition herself. Her own education had been largely at home with governesses, with the addition of a French master and a drawing master. Now, as well as teaching basic skills, she also had to mend the students’ stockings and cut the quill pens which they used for their lessons, making forty pens a day for them. In addition, she had to get used to being treated as an equal by the school servants and addressed familiarly by her first name, when a few weeks earlier the staff would have curtseyed and called her ‘Miss’. Nothing brought home the humiliation of her family more painfully.

During the Christmas holidays, which the Quaker community enjoyed although they did not celebrate religious festivals, the Wright family gathered at their cottage. Delighted as they were to be reunited, it was clear that their mother was struggling with depression, although she put on a brave face and tried to make the holiday happy and ‘not let us feel the straitened resources of the house’.13 To add to Mary’s anxiety, Isaac Sewell came home from London and again asked her to marry him, which felt to her to be ‘a great trial’.

At this time, the period depicted in great social detail by Jane Austen, young people from middle-class families were free to fall in love and marry as their hearts led them but were strongly influenced by their parents and other relatives, whose concerns were often for the financial survival of the kin group as well as the future happiness of the couple. Among Quakers, family pressure was particularly strong because this was an unhappy period in the movement’s history and the number of adherents was shrinking. There were fewer than 20,000 Quakers in England, 500 of them living in or around Norwich.

Being a Quaker was a matter of birth. The faith did not proselytise but welcomed converts like Elizabeth Fry’s friend Amelia Opie, although few outsiders were drawn to the sober and puritanical way of life. Quakers were expected to marry within the faith and a person who decided to ‘marry out’ was ‘disowned’ by their local meeting. This meant that the communities were becoming smaller, and there was corresponding pressure on young Quakers to marry and have families. Isaac would have already asked for the approval of his own father and of John Wright, so the pressure on Mary, within her family and in the wider community, was strong. She eventually agreed to a correspondence with Isaac once he was back in London.

Mary was not in love, and was not sure that she wanted to marry at all. She described herself as ‘enthusiastic and sentimental, and my poetical reading as well as my nature had filled me with the idea that a very rare atmosphere was needed for wedded life’.14

Strict Quaker traditions forbade all the arts but had recently relaxed to allow poetry, and a few Quaker reading groups had been set up in London. Once their days of home-schooling were over, at the ages of 15 and 16, Mary and her sister Elizabeth had discovered poetry and revelled in it:

My great delight was in poetry, and the works of Moore, Southey, Byron, Scott and others, continually coming out, gave me a perpetual feast. For two years I think I read little besides … Quaker girls have little excitement in their quiet lives, and these works afforded to the craving imagination all the excitement and variety it needed.

Poetry quickly led the sisters to discover novels from the circulating library, ‘and this being forbidden fruit, we devoured it in our bedroom’.15 Thus Mary Sewell had begun an inner life of the imagination which was to sustain her through the trials of her marriage and which her daughter Anna would share from her earliest years.

Feeling that ‘My heart had never been entangled and I was not at all ready to put on chains’,16 Mary returned to her job at the school, but there her love of literature sealed her fate. Of the two sisters who ran the establishment, one was also well read and introduced Mary to Shakespeare. The two young women formed a close friendship based on their shared love of reading, which the other sister resented. Mary felt that it was wrong to come between the sisters and decided that she ought to leave the school.

She knew it would be hard to find another job and refused to become a financial burden on her father. ‘I wrought myself up to saying, “yes”,’ she recalled, adding that she did not regret her decision as long as she ‘kept my castles in view’, meaning that she consciously treasured the imaginative life created by literature as something that would sustain her through the difficulties that lay ahead. Mary was 22 and Isaac 27 years of age when they married at the meeting house at Lamas, a few hundred yards from the Wright family farm at Buxton. They spent a week by the sea at Cromer on the Norfolk coast before moving into their tiny house in Yarmouth.

After the failure of Isaac’s first business, the meeting, dominated by his father, discussed the little family’s future. At the suggestion of Isaac’s brother William, the meeting decided that they should move to London, where Isaac was to open his own draper’s shop. What little money Isaac had left was spent in buying a house at 38 Camomile Street, just off Bishopsgate in the city, a few blocks away from Drapers’ Hall, the headquarters of the ancient guild of cloth merchants. Then, as now, this was the heart of the city’s business district, although it was still a residential area, crowded with homes and shops beside the offices.

The grander houses were never far from areas of terrible poverty and already wealthy families like the Frys, whose London home was only ten minutes’ walk from Camomile Street, were maintaining weekday homes in the city and escaping the dirt, stink and crowds to their country estates at weekends. Isaac used the last of his capital to convert the building so that the ground floor became a shop, and after six months at home with her parents, Mary and her baby daughter were able to join him in London.

It is entirely possible that the elder William Sewell promoted the move to London for his troublesome sons in order to distance himself from them. It is notable that, as Isaac Sewell’s fortunes wavered and he struggled to provide for his young family, it was Mary’s family, the Wrights, who stepped in with support in cash and kind. Quakers might have been compassionate to the failures of others, but they abhorred dishonesty and dealt sternly with those who had not maintained the highest standards during hard times. There was a hard-headed ruthlessness in parts of the community and the stern portraits of William Sewell suggest that he shared that tendency.

The strictures of Quaker belief limited their employment opportunities, so that many of the men went into trade or business. Although most Quakers read the Bible every day, they did not recognise it as a sacred book and would not take an oath on it, which meant that the law, politics and the newly founded police force were closed to them as professions. Most Quakers were pacifists, to the extent that as young women both Anna Sewell and Elizabeth Fry wrestled with their consciences if a military band was playing within their hearing, so a career in the armed services was impossible.

Quaker men had become prominent merchants and bankers, however, and in this sector the foundation principle of integrity had won them a glowing reputation for honesty and prudence, which they defended by expelling those in their communities whose action fell short of exemplary. The reputation of the elder William Sewell in Yarmouth would inevitably be tarnished if his sons’ enterprises foundered.

London was the last place Mary wanted to live and the reality of this vast, teeming city shocked her even more than she had feared. ‘I was taking my first lesson in fog, dirt, noise and distraction,’ she wrote. ‘Till then I had lived in the country and loved it with the ardent love of childhood and youth. I was a most rebellious scholar. I loathed and hated the place and I was nearly a stranger in it.’17 Nevertheless, she set to work to support her husband. The miserable appearance of the shop alarmed her and she made some garments from his stock to put in the window and make it look more enticing.

The shop was close to a meeting house and Isaac had expected to rely on custom from the large number of Quaker families in the neighbourhood to get his business started, without taking account of the fact that many were also in the cloth trade themselves. In addition, there was already a flourishing Quaker draper a few streets away. They had a few customers and Mary did everything she could to support her husband, including helping in the shop itself.

‘A lady called one day and asked if I knew of a needlewoman who could make some nightclothes for her.’ Mary eagerly said she knew of exactly the right person, and suggested the customer leave the cloth with her to be made up. She then sewed the nightgowns herself, ‘without telling’.18 Thus the sewing skills she had learned as a rich young woman’s pastime became a godsend when the family’s survival was in danger.

The couple had the help of one servant in the house, and at first also an assistant in the shop. Isaac was soon forced to economise by dismissing him and hiring a boy instead. Mary and the maid took on the entire care of the household, including cleaning, cooking, shopping, looking after the baby and handwashing all the clothes, after which they struggled to dry them in a dark, cold house where the basement kitchen was the only warm room.

Anna was an easy, healthy child, but Mary worried that she was confined to the building’s basement and felt guilty about making her wear dark, serviceable clothes which would need washing less often, whereas she and her sisters had been pampered babes in ruffled lace and satin ribbons. Energetic as she was, she began to slip into what would now be recognised as post-natal depression, in which a passionate yearning for the country made her feel guilty and uncontrollably anxious about her daughter:

I thought it would be impossible for me to bring up my little girl among black houses and dirty streets, with never a flower for her little hand to gather nor a bird’s song for her to hear. I used to sit and look over the roofs and the bits of blue sky, and cry like a child. Great London was to me like a huge cage with iron bars.19

To add to her worries, Mary found that she was pregnant again.

The animals that Anna Sewell saw most often in Camomile Street were the horses pulling hackney cabs who waited at a cab stand close to her home. The nippy manoeuvrable hansom cab that was to characterise Victorian London was not invented until 1834, so at this time the vehicles lining the road outside her house were simple, small carriages, each drawn by a single horse. The design had been imported from France and its name, cabriolet, shortened to cab. They also took their name from the village of Hackney to the east of the city, a traditional centre of breeding and training carriage horses. Some old-fashioned two-horse carriages for hire were still plying for trade and, as the post-war boom continued, the animals and their owners were not short of work.

A cab stand may have been picturesque and amusing for a little girl, and Black Beauty contains a vivid description of one and of the conversations that the cabmen had about the brutal economics of their business, but it can hardly have helped the passing trade for Isaac’s shop. Another disincentive to customers was undoubtedly the gin shop on the corner of Bishopsgate, which survived as the Mail Coach pub until the buildings in the entire area were demolished and glass-walled high rises built there in 2011.

Mary described it as ‘a dirty, disgusting looking place [that] … often resounded with oaths, songs and quarrels’. As if in a trance of unhappiness, she watched a woman selling fruit from a stall on the pavement outside:

A tall, haggard, white-faced woman she was, with black straggling hair, and a careworn countenance. In all seasons of the year there she sat – in the summer with her little bunches of cherries tied to sticks, and her small heaps of strawberries, gooseberries and currants piled up on leaves. In the autumn, her stall was covered with pears, apples and plums; in winter, with apples, nuts, oranges and slices of cocoanut. Hot or cold, wet or dry, there she was, often sitting in the rain, with her battered umbrella partially sheltering her and the fruit. Sometimes I have seen two or three children come to her, evidently her own; one of them, a baby, was brought in the arms of a little, lank, light-haired girl about eight years old. She would take the infant, kiss it, and give it suck; if it cried violently she would go into the gin shop with it, and presently bring it out pacified.20

If Camomile Street was rough, many of the smaller lanes and courtyards in the neighbourhood were far worse, and some of the urban areas newly settled by migrants from the country seemed like a dystopian nightmare to newcomers. London was the largest city in the world, the capital of the wealthiest country in the world, with about 2 million people at the time of Anna’s birth. It would triple in size by the end of the century, swollen by people like the young Sewells who had tried to escape the poverty and uncertainty of life in the country by moving to what seemed to be an ever-growing centre of prosperity.

They quickly learned that the prosperity they sought to share had been achieved by the hard work of people and animals with nothing wasted on the welfare of either. The city had grown without planning, without public health legislation, and without any care or understanding for its inhabitants, human or animal. Fifty thousand people were homeless, sleeping in the streets or in the parks.

Many thousands more were crammed into jerry-built housing, ten people or more to a room, with no possessions except the ragged clothes they stood up in. One of the charities for which the Sewells’ friend Mary Bayly worked kept an iron pot to loan out to families who had nothing to cook with, but many of them had no stove and no money for fuel either.21

Mary Sewell herself was to argue passionately the economics of soap, an unattainable luxury for people who had hardly enough money to feed themselves. Adults and children slept on straw or rags on the floor, with a chamber pot or, at ground level, a hole dug in one corner of an earth floor for a lavatory. In most of the city there was no piped water or sewage. Tuberculosis, pneumonia and cholera were common. Life expectancy was just 37 years – although it was much longer among Quakers, whose close communities supported their weaker members.

Unhappy as she was, Mary tried to help the people living in poverty around her. Her upbringing had emphasised ‘a sense of duty and social responsibility, which implies that one is on earth to improve the lot of others’.22 Unlike many of the middle-class women who undertook voluntary social work with their disadvantaged neighbours, she never attempted to foist a Bible on an illiterate family or offer the comfort of prayer or a sermon on the evil of drink when food, or soap, or the energy to scrub a floor were what was most needed.

Above all, she listened to people, wanting to know how she could help them. Later in her life, her friends remarked that ‘in conversation she was careful not to smother the thoughts and observations of people with whom she was conversing’,23 and she seemed to have an instinct for the feelings that people were struggling to articulate. After listening, often the best help women like Mary could offer, besides food and clothing, was literacy as, in a time before state education, most of London’s poor could not read or write and relied on others to write letters and understand documents.

A visitor like Mary, who was hardly able to feed and clothe her own family, could still read and write letters for other people, decipher documents and put people in touch with agencies that could help them, from soup kitchens to orphanages. In particular, she befriended the family of a docker whose wife had died of cholera, leaving a number of small children. For a young mother expecting her second child, it was either brave or foolish to expose herself to an infectious disease that was often fatal. She was to continue in this kind of volunteer social work for most of her life and her experiences would inform her own writing as well as that of her daughter Anna.

Mary had a warmly sympathetic nature as well as a sense of duty and could readily put herself in the position of people like the desperate fruit-seller who resorted to calming her baby with gin. While this added to her own anxious state as her husband struggled with his failing business, she was to look back on this dark period and write:

I was rebellious at having to live in that dingy place in London. I only existed on the hope of its coming to an end, and yet I am sure I should never have understood the poor and been able to help them as I have done, if I had not had that experience. The depths I was taken down to during those two years taught me more than any number of years looking on. And yet how I hated it.24

The little shop at last saw no customers at all and another meeting was called, this time more a Sewell family conference, which also suggests that the eminent elder William was anxious to contain the reputational damage threatened by his sons. Unfortunately, in Mary’s eyes, the ideas of the younger William were again accepted and Isaac’s little business was taken over by a much larger concern, run by a man who proved to be ‘reckless and unsound in his trading principles’.25

The little family moved briefly to a large house with a number of servants ‘and as it was a long-established business it was expected to do well, but before two years it was broken up, and so was I. It was a miserable failure; Isaac lost everything he had.’26

Anna’s younger brother Philip was born in the depths of this disaster and the doctor who attended Mary insisted that she should leave London for the sake of her health. They rented two rooms in the village of Hackney and their furniture was sold to pay their debts. Mary ‘grieved a little’ to see her wedding presents auctioned, particularly the tea urn given to them by her mother, as it represented the death of her dream to entertain her family in her own little home. Her brother John and another friend bought some of the goods, which gave them enough money to rent a house in Dalston, only 3 miles to the north of Camomile Street, by then a new-built Georgian suburb in which houses had large gardens separated by communal green spaces. It was not the country, but it was to be a happy place for Mary and her children for the next nine years.

Isaac was declared bankrupt but somehow escaped expulsion from the Quaker community, perhaps because he himself had acted honestly and was clearly the innocent victim, while the blame for the collapse of the business was attributed to the wealthier partner, and perhaps because he moved from the catchment area around one meeting house to another. Either way, the elder William Sewell was spared the shame of his son’s failure. Isaac took a job as a travelling salesman for a large lace manufacturer in Nottingham, and his long hours often left his young family alone until late at night. Anna and Philip grew up seeing their father only on Sundays and Mary settled down to home-school her children.

2

HELL FOR ANIMALS (1822−24)

So many animals lived in Regency London that it was called an ‘agropolis’.1 As thousands of people migrated to the city from the country every year, their food, transport and power were largely provided by animals. The expanding settlement swallowed up outlying villages like Chelsea and Hackney with the most minimal planning, no regulation and no provision for infrastructure, so that paved roads, drains and access to clean water, natural light and ventilation were rarely considered by the landlords and speculative builders. Between the crooked medieval streets in the City and the elegant neoclassical terraces recently built to the west around Oxford Street and Regent Street, thousands of green spaces, from tiny yards to what are now the spacious inner-city parks, were home to cattle, donkeys, chickens, rabbits and pigs.

A typical street in central London would be crowded with horses, carrying individual riders or drawing cabs, private carriages, stagecoaches or carts loaded with everything from fine millinery to night soil. Once his youth is over and his luck runs out, Black Beauty spends a good portion of his life as a London cab horse and Anna Sewell gives us a detailed picture of good cabmen and bad, and the perils of rushing to catch a train through the teeming streets. An old former cavalry horse with whom Beauty works is fatally injured when a drunken drayman, driving too fast, crashes into the cab they are pulling.

Licences were given to cabmen for six or seven days, and the unlucky horses whose owners had seven-day licences could be worked day and night with no rest day at all. This is the fate of Beauty’s former stablemate, Ginger, who dies from overwork in a tragic passage that has been seared into the memory of millions of readers. The book also tells of Seedy Sam, a cabman who can’t afford his own horses, so has to rent them and work such long hours that he too passes away in a hard winter.

The poorer traders, keeping market stalls or smaller shops, relied on donkeys. The mighty monarchs of the draught animals were the dray horses kept at the city’s numerous breweries. The brewing industry in London was an economy of its own. The dray horses – massive creatures who towered over their owners at 7ft or more at the shoulder – were worked twelve hours a day in pairs or teams; a team of six could haul a load of beer in barrels weighing 1.5 tonnes. Breweries worked around the clock getting deliveries to shops, pubs and inns all over the city and could keep 100 or more horses in purpose-built stables.

These giant draught horses, mostly from a breed called Midland Black,2 were prized and well-managed animals, descended from the war horses of earlier times and bred for their gentleness as well as their strength. A visitor to a London brewery was astonished to see that the horses knew their work so well that they did it almost without supervision. The waste grain, yeast deposits and gin lees from breweries were used to feed cattle and pigs in the city, a diet on which they thrived.3