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Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Black Beauty, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Horse Care, Abuse, and Neglect
Class, Transportation, and Victorian England
Good, Evil, and Power
Dignity and Religion
Summary
Analysis
When Black Beauty and Ginger are out in the paddock next, she continues her early life story. She says that a horse dealer bought her to match another chestnut horse. The pair of them were sold to a fashionable gentleman in London. Ginger says that while the dealer trained her to go with the bearing rein, her master in London insisted on reining horses in even tighter so they looked more stylish. Black Beauty, she acknowledges, has never worn a bearing rein, so he won’t understand—they’re terrible. Ginger says she likes to toss her head and hold it high, but it’s entirely different when one can’t move their head from that upright position. It makes your neck ache and requires two bits. One of Ginger’s bits made her tongue bleed, so bloody froth flew from her lips. If she ever got impatient while waiting, the driver whipped her.
As Ginger brings up the horse dealer, it introduces modern readers to the idea that Victorian-era horses were subject to many of the same systems that cars are today—they are, after all, the primary source of transportation. But Ginger also introduces readers to the horrors of the bearing rein, a rein that holds a horse’s head uncomfortably high. As Ginger’s description of bleeding and feeling constantly sore suggests, the bearing rein is an extremely negative thing. As Ginger sees it, it’s a way for people to lord their power over horses by causing them pain and making them look a certain way.
Themes
Literary Devices
Black Beauty asks if Ginger’s master didn’t care for his horses’ welfare. Ginger says he cared only about looking stylish. She also thinks he didn’t know much about horses and left his coachman in charge. The coachman was convinced Ginger had a terrible temper. He insisted that with time, Ginger would get used to it—but he spoke cruelly to her and hit her. If he'd been kind, Ginger says, she would’ve put up with it. But she was angry that she had to suffer for fashion. The bearing rein hurt, and it made it hard to breathe. She says that she became increasingly irritable and started kicking and biting. One day, she says, she threw a fuss and broke a lot of harness, so her master sold her.
Keep in mind that Black Beauty thinks people are pretty great; he’s never met a cruel person or suffered abuse, aside from Dick throwing rocks. Ginger’s story adds evidence to Duchess’s early warning that not all people are kind: some are cruel, and others are ignorant. Ginger suggests that her master was ignorant, since he wasn’t educated about the damage a bearing rein does and put someone cruel in charge of the horses. She also makes her biting and kicking habits seem like perfectly reasonable responses to such poor treatment.
Themes
Ginger continues that she was sold to another dealer. That man found out what Ginger could bear and drove her without a bearing rein, so he sold her to a country gentleman. But when that man got a new groom who was as cruel as Samson, things got bad. This man would hit her in the stall and wanted to scare her, but she was too high-spirited to be afraid. She bit him one day and he refused to come in her stall after that, though she continued to be good for her master. But her master sold her on the groom’s advice. Ginger says she went back to the kind dealer, who sold her to Squire Gordon. Ginger now believes that men are her enemies, and she must defend herself. It’s different here, she acknowledges, but how long will this last?
This dealer seemed far more concerned with horses’ welfare than most other men in Ginger’s past. However, one kind person wasn’t enough to save Ginger from cruelty in her last home—and again, Ginger was forced to resort to biting and scaring people to protect herself from ill treatment. As Ginger concludes her story, she shows how her trust in people is totally broken. Squire Gordon might be kind, she acknowledges, but she no longer trusts that even someone like him will be able to protect her forever—she’ll always be at risk of falling into cruel, abusive hands.
Themes
Black Beauty says it’d be awful if Ginger bit James or John. Ginger says she bit James once, but he came to her with a bran mash. She hasn’t bitten him since. Black Beauty feels terrible for Ginger—but he’s young and innocent, and he figures she’s making things sound worse than they were. But as the weeks pass, she becomes gentler and more cheerful. James even remarks one day that she seems to like him. John agrees, and even Squire Gordon notices the change in her. John insists it was a treatment of “Birtwick balls” that did it; this is a joke that patience, gentleness, and affection will cure a vicious horse.
James’s behavior after Ginger bites him is a major departure from other men’s behavior after Ginger bit them—he seems to realize she’s biting out of fear, not meanness. And eventually, James and John’s kindness starts to show Ginger that she can trust them and relax. “Horse balls” were Victorian-era horse medicine; most formulations did nothing, but John implies that the most effective medicine a person can give a horse is kindness.
Themes
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