The first publisher of Black Beauty was Jarrold and Sons of London in 1877. They bought the book for a flat fee of twenty pounds, a little bit less that $3,000 in today's money. Anna Sewell (the author) and her heirs saw no royalties, but Jarrold and Sons made a fortune. The book was a runaway bestseller and has been continuously in print to this day. Sewell, who was fifty-seven at the time of the book's publication, died shortly after it came out, so she did not live to see its phenomenal success.

The first American edition was produced by the F. M. Lupton Publishing Co. of New York. In the United States, after 1890, publishers began to call the book the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of a horse in order to capitalize on the association with Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The original publisher of Black Beauty was Jarrold & Sons.