Sunday

Sunday in Black Beauty is a recurring day of rest whose meaning depends on who controls the work. For Jerry Barker’s horses, it brings recovery, fresh air, and time together; for horses and drivers caught in exploitative cab systems, it can be withheld altogether. The contrast makes Sunday more than a calendar observance: it measures whether people treat rest as a basic need or as an expense to be denied.

Rest and Care in Jerry Barker’s Stable

Jerry Barker’s horses work hard during the week, and Black Beauty considers their Sundays essential to sustaining that labor. The day allows them to recover and enjoy one another’s company. It also gives Black Beauty time to hear a companion’s history: on Sundays he learns about Captain, formerly trained as an army horse. Rest therefore serves both bodily recovery and the social life of the stable.

Jerry’s ordinary care reinforces the value of this weekly pause. He keeps the horses clean, varies their food as far as he can, and leaves clean water available day and night, except when they come in warm. He also makes their stalls more comfortable by fitting movable bars across the back; when the horses are resting, he removes their halters and puts up the bars so they can turn and stand in either direction. These daily provisions do not replace a day off. Rather, they belong to the same attentive practice of recognizing the horses’ needs.

The narrative connects Sunday rest to physical condition. Black Beauty observes that the horses could scarcely have kept up their hard weekday work without the day away from it. Later, under a different owner, he remembers Jerry’s Saturday-night bran mash with niter in hot weather, followed by two nights and a whole day of uninterrupted rest. The combination left the horses fresh on Monday. The memory makes the contrast with unbroken work especially concrete: a regular pause, together with suitable care, could restore energy that continual labor steadily consumed.

A License That Limits Sunday Work

Sunday also has a legal and economic dimension. When a gentleman asks Jerry to take Mrs. Briggs to church regularly, Jerry declines because he holds a six-days’ cab license and taking a fare on Sunday would not be legal. The refusal is not presented as indifference to the customer: he explains the restriction, and the passage makes clear that the license itself defines the days on which his cab may earn fares. A note records that, some years later, the annual license charge was reduced and the distinction between six- and seven-day cabs abolished, marking a change in the licensing arrangement described in the narrative.

In ordinary circumstances, Jerry’s Sunday boundary protects the horses as well as the household’s shared time. Mrs. Briggs continues to hire him, but not on Sundays. After a tiring Saturday night, Jerry and the horses look forward to a day of rest. The routine is interrupted when Dinah Brown receives word that her mother is dangerously ill and must be reached quickly. The country destination is more than ten miles away; taking the train would still leave four miles to walk. Dinah is weak and has a four-week-old baby, making that journey impracticable.

Jerry initially weighs the request against the lost rest, since both he and the horses are tired. Polly Barker urges him to consider what he would want if his own mother were dying, and argues that helping someone in urgent need need not violate the Sabbath. Jerry agrees to take Dinah and borrows a light trap from a butcher who does not use it on Sundays, choosing a vehicle that would make the journey easier for the horse. The episode distinguishes a compassionate exception from routine commercial work: Sunday remains a day to protect, but its purpose is not treated as a rule that forbids aid.

After the journey, Jerry and Black Beauty spend time in a meadow. Unharnessed, Black Beauty eats grass, rolls, rests, and gallops; Jerry sits beneath a tree, listens to birds, reads from his little brown book, and gathers flowers. On returning, Jerry tells Polly that he has not lost his Sunday, finding worship in the birds’ singing and in the time outdoors. The day’s value is thus shown not only in stopping work, but in recovering a gentler relation between driver and horse. Jerry gives Dolly the flowers, extending that reprieve into a small family pleasure.

Rest Denied by the Cab Trade

The book sets Jerry’s practice against the conditions of drivers who rent horses and cabs from large owners. Black Beauty explains that his own driver owns him and has an interest in treating him well, while hired drivers must first earn enough to pay the owners before they can support themselves. Seedy Sam describes the cost of that arrangement: in the season, a man may owe eighteen shillings a day for a cab and two horses, effectively requiring nine shillings from each horse before he has earned anything for his own household. Sam says that he has worked fourteen or sixteen hours a day and gone ten or twelve weeks without a Sunday because Nicholas Skinner would allow no day off if he could avoid it.

The pressure is not confined to the driver’s schedule. The fares, distance, luggage, and return journey all affect how much labor a horse must perform for a limited return. Sam recounts a six-mile journey that paid three shillings, with no return fare, followed by another fare involving heavy luggage. He describes the legal limit as sixpence a mile after the first within the four-mile radius, and explains how the day’s mileage and earnings left more work to be extracted from the horses before he could earn for himself. His account shows why a simple instruction not to overwork a horse cannot by itself secure rest when the driver is trapped by rent, low fares, and family need.

Under Nicholas Skinner, Black Beauty experiences the other end of that system directly. There is no Sunday rest, even in summer. On some Sundays, parties of fast men hire the cab for the day and travel ten or fifteen miles into the country and back; the passengers do not get down to walk up steep hills. Black Beauty becomes fevered and worn, sometimes struggling to eat. He remembers the bran mash and long rest he had under Jerry, while his new driver uses a cruel whip and makes the work harder still. Sunday, which had meant renewal, becomes another working day with no recovery built into it.

Sunday as an Ethical Measure

Across these episodes, Sunday brings together bodily need, livelihood, law, and compassion. Jerry’s license places a formal limit on paid work, and his usual observance gives his horses dependable recovery. His journey for Dinah shows that care can also require a considered departure from routine: the borrowed light trap reduces the burden on the horse while helping a mother reach her dying parent. By contrast, Seedy Sam’s account and Black Beauty’s later experience under Skinner expose how a nominal day of rest means little when owners can demand continuous work and the people below them cannot afford to refuse.

The day also changes the texture of the narrative. Weekday labor is measured in fares, distance, and exertion; Sunday opens space for companionship, remembered experience, outdoor freedom, and family life. Its presence or absence reveals the conditions under which people and horses live. In that sense, the observance is not merely private devotion or a scheduling custom: it is a practical test of whether a working animal is treated as a living companion with limits, or only as a means of earning money.