Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
The novel traces the life and adventures of Black Beauty, a horse in 19th century England. It opens with Beauty's descriptions of her life as a foal (young horse) in the house of a gentle master named Farmer Gray. He runs and plays in the meadow and receives lectures from his mother, the Duchess, on the importance of being kind and gentle and never biting or kicking - basically the equestrian equivalent of an English gentleman.
At the age of two, Beauty attends a hunting party pursuing a hare and the tragic death of one of the riders during a fall from a horse. The horse, also injured, is dropped off. The experience scares him.
When Beauty was four, Farmer Gray trained her to carry jumpers on her back and pull cars. After being sent to a neighbor's pasture near the station to get used to the sounds of the road, Beauty is sold to Squire Gordon at Birtwick Hall. This is where it gets its name; apart from a white star on its forehead and a white hoof, its coat is shiny black.
In Berwick, Beauty meets and befriends the other horses in the stable: Merrylegs, Ginger, and Sir Oliver. Squire Gordon and his coachman, John, are kind men who believe in treating horses well, and Beauty's work with them is humane and happy until the Gordon's have to move to a warmer climate to Mrs. Gordon's health.
The beauty is sold to a number of different houses, from Earlshall Park, a fashion house where his mistress, Lady Anne, works her horses hard, to a stable that rents cars and finally to a London taxi driver named Jerry Barker, the first really nice master Beauty has after leaving Birtwick. His other masters and barn managers overwork him, neglect his care and hygiene, and even steal his oats.
After Jerry gets sick and has to leave the taxi business, Beauty is sold to a corn merchant, then another cab driver who is lazy and treats his horses with meanness. When Beauty collapses from overwork, he is auctioned off to a gentle farmer who looks after him before selling him to the Bloomfield's, who were neighbors of the Gordon's. In the care of their groom, who had once been a stable boy in Birtwick, Beauty lives the rest of her life in a kind and loving home.
