Octavia Hill

English social reformer

• Born: December 3, 1838
• Birthplace: Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England
• Died: August 13, 1912
• Place of death: London, England

Hill sought to cope with the social consequences of slum housing by creating and managing a system of humane and personal contact between landlord and tenant. Concern with the urban environment also led her to preserve open spaces for public use, to fight against smoke pollution, and to assist in the establishment of the National Trust.

Early Life

Octavia Hill was the eighth of the ten daughters of James Hill and the third of five daughters of Caroline Southwood Smith, James Hill’s third wife. She was born shortly before her father entered into a bankruptcy and despondency that necessitated the division of the family. The children of the first two marriages were shipped off to maternal grandfathers, but the third Mrs. Hill, with the help of her father, Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith, an important sanitary reformer, managed to keep her five daughters together.

Hill thus grew up without brothers, while her weak and bewildered father hovered ineffectually in the background. Hill’s mother was left with responsibility for the large contingent of daughters and Hill herself, obviously the most competent of the brood, rapidly became their recognized leader, as their mother necessarily busied herself with earning the cash required to keep the family going. Hill, then, functioning from an early age in an essentially all-female household, became accustomed to exercising leadership. This youthful experience, foreign to most Victorian women, was the source of her strength. Physically, Hill was short, in later life even dumpy, but her broad shoulders and massive head reinforced the power of her personality.

The family’s unsettled finances resulted in frequent uprooting during Hill’s childhood, and Hill lived in a succession of villages implanted in the fields on the outer fringes of London. Hill received no formal schooling but, mastering reading and writing before she was five, was educated by her mother, by interaction with her sisters, and through her own voracious reading. In consequence of her mother’s connection with Frederick Denison Maurice’s Christian Socialist movement, Hill at the age of fourteen was put in charge of a workshop where Ragged School girls made toy furniture.

Hill used her burgeoning artistic talents to design the furniture; she was also responsible for the management of the girls, some of them older than she, and for the operation’s finances. From her experience at the workshop, Hill learned for the first time about living conditions for the poor in London. During the same period, she made the acquaintance of John Ruskin, the art critic, who visited the workshop and supplied advice on color. The connection with Ruskin led to lessons in art with Hill copying paintings at the public museums under Ruskin’s direction. By 1862, the sisters had established a girls’ school in Nottingham Place, Marylebone, in north-central London, where Hill shared in the teaching tasks.

Life’s Work

In time, Ruskin became convinced that Hill did not have real artistic talent. While that realization was taking hold, Hill’s experience in Marylebone turned her mind to serious consideration of the social problems arising from wretched inner-city housing. Ruskin and Hill, in a fruitful meeting of minds, determined to establish Hill as a landlord, purchasing a few working-class houses with Ruskin’s money and utilizing Hill’s managerial talent. Three houses, virtually slums, the first of many, were acquired in Paradise Place, Marylebone, in 1864. The plan was to improve the working-class tenants by improving their living environment. The houses were cleaned, repaired, and painted, and their surroundings were spruced up, all the work being done under Hill’s close supervision and much of it at first by her personally. Tenants were assured that a certain percentage of their rent money would be spent on the buildings, on repairs if necessary, but on improvements if tenants cared for their own quarters in such a way as to obviate the need for repairs. It was hoped and expected that tenants in more pleasant houses would become themselves more civilized, more sober, and more productive members of society.

An important part of the scheme was to become acquainted with the tenants as individuals—to convert the weekly calls for the collection of rent into social occasions at which the rent collectors, first Hill in person, and later one of the many young ladies she mobilized to help in the work, would meet the tenant’s family over tea, offer advice and friendship, and treat them as respected human beings. Tenants’ parties and country outings conducted by Hill supplemented the rent collection visits as part of the effort to establish friendly guidance for the tenants. Tenants who fell behind on the rent were, after suitable grace periods, evicted. Hill was convinced that there was good in most people, but not in all. She was willing to abandon those who did not live by her rules, which she assumed were the rules of respectable society.

An annual report, entitled “Letters to My Fellow Workers,” which Hill first issued in 1871, supplied a means of communication for Hill to her ever-widening circle of assistants and trainees. The work was not totally philanthropic. The houses were expected to produce a small income, both in order to protect the tenants from any feeling that they were relying on charity, and to demonstrate to other landlords that money could be made from decently maintained dwellings. By the early 1880’s, properties managed under the Hill system housed 378 families, or about two thousand individuals. These numbers increased substantially during the mid-1880’s when she became the agent for the Ecclesiastical Commission’s properties in south London. Even with the great expansion of her work, her interest always lay in the rehabilitation of small preexisting dwellings, not in the construction by charity or public money of vast new and, she thought, dehumanizing housing projects.

In 1877, by which time she was already well known for her work in housing, Hill was forced to face unambiguously the choice between career and marriage that in a less obvious manner confronted many other Victorian women. In that year, she became engaged to Edward Bond, a colleague in housing work. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that Bond’s widowed mother did not want to give up her son. For Hill, it was not an attractive proposition to abandon public activity for a role as a dutiful and reclusive wife in a household dominated by a mother-in-law. Hill chose to continue her career. The engagement was canceled, but the strain of the decision led to a severe nervous breakdown. Hill withdrew from her work for two years to recuperate by traveling on the Continent with a new companion, Harriot Yorke, chosen by her friends to watch over her. Yorke stayed with Hill throughout the rest of Hill’s life, being her chief of staff, best friend, and personal companion.

Hill’s work with her tenants led directly to her second area of activity, her concern with issues of conservation and preservation encompassed at the time by the word “amenity.” Swiss Cottage Fields, an undeveloped area where Hill had played as a child and where she often took her Marylebone tenants on outings, was in 1873 carved up into streets and house lots. In an unsuccessful fight against its urbanization, Hill was introduced to the Commons Preservation Society and became acquainted with its solicitor, Robert Hunter . Her connections with both were immensely important in her subsequent work.

Shortly after the failure at Swiss Cottage, one of Hill’s sisters, Miranda, urged the establishment of a society to introduce beauty into the lives of the poor. Hill, seizing upon the idea, founded in 1875 the Kyrle Society, named for John Kyrle, who had, through his personal endeavors, as celebrated by Alexander Pope, beautified his own surroundings. Hill’s new society sought to bring to the people of the London slums beauty in all of its forms: in small gardens and green spaces, in freshly cut wildflowers, in works of art liberated from intimidating museums, in bright paint splashed on dull gray walls, in great literature, in choral music. Hill sought in Kyrle, as in her housing activity, close personal involvement with the poor.

Of the greatest public importance was Kyrle’s Open Spaces Division, which supplied the organizational structure enabling Hill to begin her efforts for the preservation of open spaces near London. Hill, working sometimes in coordination with the Commons Preservation Society, raised money to prevent building at Hilly Fields, Parliament Hill, Vauxhall Park, and other areas in the metropolis. In concert with the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Kyrle’s Open Spaces Division acquired rights over disused burial grounds in central London, redesigning them as small open air sitting rooms for the neighborhood. Similar Kyrle Societies came into existence at Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Leicester, and Liverpool.

In 1895, Hill and Hunter, reinforced by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, an acquaintance from early years in inner London social work, founded the best known of the Victorian environmental organizations, the National Trust . The trust was designed to protect buildings or areas of natural beauty or historic interest by buying or otherwise acquiring title to them. It focused originally on saving ancient monuments, medieval buildings, ocean cliffs, and pleasant south-of-England hilltops. Hill took no formal office in the National Trust but attended its committee meetings regularly, actively solicited and explored projected National Trust properties, and raised money through numerous contacts within her oft-exploited personal network.

Hill’s interest in housing also led her to become closely involved with the movement for smoke abatement. She organized a Smoke Abatement Exhibition during the winter of 1881-1882, where 116,000 people examined devices designed to burn fuel more cleanly and efficiently so as to reduce smoke while, incidentally, saving money. The exhibition’s manifest success led to the establishment of the National Smoke Abatement Institution, which in turn inspired the foundation in 1898 of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society.

Indicative of Hill’s reputation as an expert on social issues was her inclusion among the members of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, in 1893 and 1894, and on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, of 1905 to 1909. As an active proponent of the doctrine of the Charity Organization Society, with which she had worked since the late 1860’s, Hill on both commissions supported the role of private initiative and the free economy as against suggestions for active state involvement, clashing against Beatrice Webb’s socialistic views on the latter of the two commissions. Hill died on August 13, 1912, at the home on Marylebone Road, London, which she and Yorke had shared during the last twenty-one years of her life.

Significance

Octavia Hill was best known to her contemporaries for her work in housing, although her approach appears to later twentieth century observers as distastefully patronizing to the tenants. It has left no mark on housing policies of late twentieth century England. Hill’s labor-intensive system could offer shelter to only a minute percentage of the vast and increasing London lower classes. Hill herself pointed out in 1875 that the twenty-six thousand people housed through various philanthropic schemes in the preceding thirty years represented about six months’ increase in London’s population. It has been argued that the public attention that became focused on Hill’s endeavors actually delayed any effective overall attack on the problem of housing of the London poor.

More significant for the future was Hill’s lesser-known work in conservation and preservation. Many London open spaces were protected from urban development by the fund-raising efforts of Hill and her Kyrle Society. Although Kyrle died with Hill, her well-publicized successes helped encourage other private groups and, eventually, the state, to pursue similar objectives. The National Trust survives and prospers as a major civilizing element in contemporary England. Concentrating on acquisition and preservation of many of the great English country houses and on protecting the remaining unspoiled segments of the English coastline, the National Trust has become the third largest landowner in England and one of the country’s most visible voluntary agencies.

Hill’s work in smoke abatement encouraged establishment of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society in 1898. A lineal descendant of that society was active in passage of mid-twentieth century legislation that at long last effectively dealt with smoke pollution in Britain. When during the 1960’s there came a great surge of interest in environmental protection, Hill’s status as a significant and constructive environmental pioneer became recognized.

Bibliography

Bell, E. Moberly. Octavia Hill. London: Constable, 1942. The standard biography, although imprecise in documentation and generally uncritical.

Boyd, Nancy. Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World: Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Section 2 sketches Hill’s career as an introduction to an examination of its religious and moral motivation.

Hill, Octavia. Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill. Edited by Robert Whalen. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1998. Whalen has edited this collection of Hill’s letters, lectures, and other writings about housing issues, including some documents that have never before been published.

Hill, William Thomson. Octavia Hill: Pioneer of the National Trust and Housing Reformer. London: Hutchinson, 1956. Readable and uncritical; goes beyond Bell primarily in reference to Hill’s environmental work.

Liebman, George W. Six Lost Leaders: Prophets of Civil Society. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001. Hill’s efforts to improve housing are included in this examination of six people who believed their individual efforts could improve social conditions.

Maurice, C. Edmund. Life of Octavia Hill as Told in Her Letters. London: Macmillan, 1914. The authorized biography, by Hill’s brother-in-law, based largely on her letters, many of which are quoted at length. Detailed, but reticent on personal matters.

Owen, David. English Philanthropy, 1660-1960. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Treats its massive topic with grace and penetrating insight. Owen describes Hill’s work in housing and in open spaces preservation with understanding while fitting it into its wider contexts.

Ranlett, John. “’Checking Nature’s Desecration’: Late-Victorian Environmental Organization.” Victorian Studies 26 (Winter, 1983): 197-222. An overview of the organization of the late-Victorian environmental movement, emphasizing the network of personal connections that linked the various volunteer societies and identifying Hill’s position in that network.

Wohl, Anthony S. The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977. A comprehensive discussion of lower-class housing and of a variety of private and public efforts for its regulation and improvement. Wohl finds Hill’s contribution important but not altogether admirable.