Kerschen is a school district administrator and freelance writer. In this essay, Kerschen discusses the moral lessons, particularly about temperance, that Sewell incorporates into Black Beauty.

In the first chapter of Black Beauty, Anna Sewell provides her hero with a wise admonition from his mother: "I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will." This advice may have come from an equine mother, but it is the kind of moral instruction that humans could use as well. It was Sewell's stated intent to write a book that would "induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses." That is, the subject was not horses, but the treatment of horses, and therefore the book was a set of instructions for humans. In the process, Sewell set forth not only the proper care of horses, but the...