Beautiful Joe: An Autobiography

an autobiography by Marshall Saunders author of My Spanish Sailor, Charles and his Lamb, Daisy etc.
with an introduction
by Hezekiah Butterworth
Youth's Companion
1903.
To George Thorndike Angell President Of The American Humane Education Society The Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Parent American Band of Mercy 19 Milk St., Boston This Book is Respectfully Dedicated by the Author
Beautiful Joe is a real dog, and Beautiful Joe is his real name. He belonged during the first part of his life to a cruel master, who mutilated him in the manner described in the story. He was rescued from him, and is now living in a happy home with pleasant surroundings, and enjoys a wide local celebrity.
The character of Laura is drawn from life, and to the smallest detail is truthfully depicted. The Morris family has its counterparts in real life, and nearly all of the incidents of the story are founded on fact.
The Author
The wonderfully successful book, entitled Black Beauty, came like a living voice out of the animal kingdom. But it spake for the horse, and made other books necessary; it led the way. After the ready welcome that it received, and the good it has accomplished and is doing, it followed naturally that some one should be inspired to write a book to interpret the life of a dog to the humane feeling of the world. Such a story we have in Beautiful Joe.
The story speaks not for the dog alone, but for the whole animal kingdom. Through it we enter the animal world, and are made to see as animals see, and to feel as animals feel. The sympathetic sight of the author, in this interpretation, is ethically the strong feature of the book.
Such books as this is one of the needs of our progressive system of education. The day-school, the Sunday-school, and all libraries for the young, demand the influence that shall teach the reader how to live in sympathy with the animal world; how to understand the languages of the creatures that we have long been accustomed to call dumb, and the sign language of the lower orders of these dependent beings. The church owes it to her mission to preach and to teach the enforcement of the bird's nest commandment; the principle recognized by Moses in the Hebrew world, and echoed by Cowper in English poetry, and Burns in the Meadow Mouse, and by our own Longfellow in songs of many keys.