Writing Black Beauty (eBook)

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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...