English · Beginner
Read Black Beauty in Englishwith every sentence explained
Anna Sewell · 1877
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was first published in 1877. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 59,500 words.
A horse tells his own story — and asks us to be kind.
Black Beauty begins life in a peaceful English meadow, a handsome black colt with a white star on his forehead. His mother gives him one piece of advice: always do your work with a good will, and never bite or kick.
Sold to a kind master at Birtwick Park, he makes friends with the gentle pony Merrylegs and the bad-tempered mare Ginger, who has suffered at the hands of cruel men. But a horse cannot choose his owners, and as the years pass Beauty will be passed from hand to hand, seeing the best and the worst of how people treat the animals who serve them.
Written by Anna Sewell in 1877, Black Beauty changed the way the world thought about animal welfare and remains one of the best-selling books of all time.
- Author
- Anna Sewell
- First published
- 1877
- Language
- English
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children
- Length
- About 59,500 words
How it opens
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master's house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank.
Reading Black Beauty in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
