Be Kind to Animals: Happy Birthday to Anna Sewell

I've mentioned how much I loved to read when growing up on this blog before. The author of one of my favorite childhood books was born today in 1820, Anna Sewell:

Anna Sewell is born in Norfolk, England. The daughter of a successful children’s book writer, she helped edit her mother’s manuscripts from an early age but was not published herself until she was 57. Black Beauty, the first significant children’s story in the English language to focus on animal characters, established the precedent for countless other works.

Appalled by the cruel treatment of horses by some masters during her day, Sewell wrote the book “to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.” The story, narrated by the horse, showed Black Beauty’s progression through a series of increasingly cruel owners until the exhausted, ill-treated animal collapses. In the end, the horse is saved by a kind owner.

Sewell wrote the book during the last seven years of her life, when she became an invalid confined to her home. The book was published shortly before her death in 1878 and became one of the best-loved children’s classics of all time. The book was made into a movie three times, in 1946, 1971, and 1994.

My husband and I could not stand to watch the 1994 movie; it's one thing to read about the cruelty, another to see it portrayed so realistically on film. Sewell's family was Quaker but then joined the Church of England in 1835. Did the participation of Anglican William Wilberforce in the efforts to pass the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 influence this change in religious affiliation, I wonder? or his co-founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824?

Another favorite book from my childhood, related to Black Beauty, was Beautiful Joe, written by (Margaret) Marshall Saunders, about a family that cares for and protects abused and abandoned animals. Both of these novels have a moral message but are still good stories, even if the device of the horse or the dog narrating his story requires tremendous suspension of disbelief. 

William Wilberforce, The Great Emancipator, RIP

 

When the movie Amazing Grace was released on DVD several years ago, we gave copies of it to many people as Christmas presents because we were so impressed by the story of William Wilberforce--who died on July 29 in 1833--and the effectiveness of the presentation of his causes and faith in the movie (although the latter was not as focused as it could have been). The movie was based on Eric Metaxas' book AMAZING GRACE: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. More on his life and influence here, from the BBC.

 

Of course, the movie does not depict what happened in the Wilberforce family after his death: that three of his sons would become Catholics, mostly under the influence of the Oxford Movement. For that story, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Man­ning by David Newsome is an excellent source. As David Denton reviewed Newsome's book in The New Oxford Review in 1994, he notes the context of their conversions:

 

In England in the early 1800s, William Wilberforce was the Great Emancipator. He had been the most visible personality in the abo­lition of the British slave trade (1807), and of slavery itself in the Empire, though that would only occur shortly after his death. The joyful, self-sacrificing Christian influence that the senior Wilberforce and others of that wealthy evangelical group, the "Clapham Sect," brought to bear on English society was consider­able. They have aptly been charac­terized as the Fathers of the Victo­rian Age.

Wilberforce sent three sons, Robert, Samuel, and Henry, to be educated at Oxford's Oriel College. This was a departure for an evan­gelical or Low Churchman, since most sons of these families were sent to Cambridge University, which was considered much more sympathetic to Low Church theol­ogy. At Oxford these bright, high-minded sons of the Great Emanci­pator became part of the golden academic renaissance that had been taking place there since the turn of the 17th century. There they came into contact not only with the High Church influence of John Keble and Edward Posey, but with Hurrell Froude and John Henry Newman, both former evangelicals whose Anglo-Catholi­cism had not only begun to nettle the somnambulant C. of E., but was, for evangelicals, threatening the Reformation itself. Troubling as they were for evangelicals, these Anglo-Catholics were inexorable adversaries of the latitudinarian­ism growing in power at Oxford and in the C. of E., which, then as now, submits the creeds, doc­trines, and Scriptures to the delu­sions of skeptical reason and the acids of materialism.

 

In fact, it's interesting to note that William Wilberforce died just 15 days after John Keble preached his "National Apostasy" sermon and at the very date of his death, Hugh James Rose was holding a meeting at his church rectory in Hadleigh to form the Association of Friends of the Church, which Hurrell Froude and William Palmer led. The Oxford Movement or Tractarian movement really took off with John Henry Newman's sermons in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin and the "Tracts for the Times", but the seeming coincidence of dates between the death of the Great Emancipator and the beginning of the Oxford Movement is fascinating.

William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was born on August 24, 1759. Several years ago, my husband and I enjoyed the movie Amazing Grace so much that we gave everyone in our families a copy of the DVD for Christmas. While it may not have emphasized the connection between Wilberforce's faith in Jesus Christ to his humanitarian efforts, which included child welfare and the end of the slave trade, of slavery, and other ethical and moral issues, like the prevention of cruelty to animals, it made it clear that he was a Christian and a good man.

Wilberforce was an evangelical Anglican, yet his sons were all influenced in one way or another by the Oxford Movement. Three of his sons followed Blessed John Henry Newman and Henry Manning into the Catholic Church (William, Henry, and Robert). The other son, Samuel, was Bishop of Oxford and then of Winchester. Wilberforce at first had opposed Catholic Emancipation but he later supported its passage in 1829, although he was out of office by then.

The BBC posts a biography here.