Octavia Hill
With help from friends, notably John Ruskin, in 1865 she began to acquire dilapidated houses in London for rehabilitation and letting to the poor. Her work expanded until utlimately she was managing some 6,000 dwellings.
Octavia Hill was born at Wisbech 3 December 1838, the eighth daughter of James Hill, corn-merchant and banker, who was noted locally for his good work in municipal and educational reform. Her mother was Caroline Southwood Smith, daughter of Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith [q.v.], well known as an authority on fever epidemics and sanitation. Octavia came under the influence of this grandfather early in life, and from him heard much about the condition of the homes of the poor. The younger sisters of the family were educated by their mother, a woman of much character and charm, with a view to earning their living as soon as possible. Octavia, who was an energetic, determined, and affectionate child with much artistic talent, began work in London about 1852 at the Ladies’ Guild, a co-operative association promoted by the Christian Socialists, of which her mother became manager. She was soon put in charge of a branch engaged in teaching ragged school-children to make toys, and thus gained her first experience of the lives of the very poor. At this time she naturally came under the influence of the Christian Socialists, and more especially of Frederick Denison Maurice [q. v.]. Another decisive influence in determining her future life and work was that of John Ruskin, whom she first met in 1853, and by whom she was greatly helped in her artistic training. For some years she employed much of her spare time in copying pictures for his Modern Painters, for the Society of Antiquaries, and for the National Portrait Gallery.
In 1856 Octavia Hill became secretary to the classes for women at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, and a few years later she and her sisters started a school at 14 Nottingham Place. It was while living here and visiting her poorer neighbours that Miss Hill first became deeply impressed with the urgency of the housing problem, and succeeded (1864) in interesting Ruskin in her schemes for improving the dwellings of the poor. In after years she maintained that it was his generosity in providing the money for the purchase of the first houses which saved her undertaking from remaining ‘a mere vision’; and though their friendship was at one time interrupted, she never wavered in her allegiance and gratitude to him. In 1865 she wrote to a friend:
‘One great event of the term has been the actual purchase for fifty-six years of three houses in a court close to us, which Ruskin has really achieved for us. We buy them full of tenants, but there is in each house at present a landlord, who comes between us and the weekly lodgers, and of whom we cannot get rid till Midsummer. All we can do, therefore, is to throw our classes open to the tenants, and to do much small personal work among them, so that we may get to know them. But all repairing, and preventing of overcrowding, and authority to exclude thoroughly disreputable lodgers, must wait till Midsummer. At that time we are to begin the alteration of our stables into one large room, which will enable us to get the tenants together for all sorts of purposes, much more easily than at present.
- sources
Fatal error: Call to undefined function mwli_link_indication() in /home/ihcra/ihcra/blog/wp-content/themes/creaturefeature/single.php on line 29