Robert Ross, in his A Concise History of South Africa, states that Black Beauty was banned. The story goes that the South African government disliked the book’s title because it placed the words ‘black’ and ‘beauty’ side by side. There appears to be some debate about whether this is true, however. There is a story that the book was banned in South Africa during the Apartheid era. This makes it the ancestor of – and a possible influence on – some notable later animal-narrated stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Maltese Cat’ (1895), which centres on a polo match told from the perspective of the ponies.ģ. Sewell’s unusual conceit was to tell the story from the perspective of the horse rather than have a human or impersonal ‘omniscient’ narrator. Black Beauty is described on its title-page as ‘translated from the equine’.
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