Tag Archives: Ruskin

City Unseen, Housing

The Letters and Life of Octavia Hill

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This is such a curious, most Victorian/Edwardian, often boring and frustrating and perhaps a tiny bit compelling accompaniment of the life of a woman whose ideas I do not share at all and who I am fairly certain I should have come to actual blows with. Yet the view into her hopes and work and life meant I was still sorry to approach the end, as it meant her death.

Octavia Hill had such a huge impact on housing in the UK, training hundreds of women into the rehabilitation, development and management of cottages and courts for the deserving working classes. This was housing meant to pay its own way and to be run never by the state but dependent entirely on voluntarism and for its foundation, the charity of the titled and the wealthy. It demanded cleanliness, hard work, good Christian morals and thankfulness of its tenants, it also asked them to sing and grow flowers. Good for some I know, but oh god, the condescension of it.

Octavia Hill. From a Drawing by Edward Clifford, 1877 from the Life of Octavia Hill as told in her letters[1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19456426

This is a selection of letters from her brother-in-law, and for our times and my own interest in housing, a rather curious one. Thick as this volume is, there is so much it leaves out, and I am curious what light Miss Hill would appear in were more here. These are undoubtedly selected to show her in her best light (according to her brother-in-law). This frustrated painter, great traveler (and the letters describing her travels are in many ways the best), devout Christian.

It is, though, just a little poignant finishing it with all of Hill’s many periodic ‘break-downs’ of health in which she must head off for the countryside, preferentially in Europe, while I myself have been off ill — overwork, anxiety, panic, stuck in my home and the insalubrious environs of Longsight. Still, sick leave is such a luxury, for both of us. [you know, I started these notes last June, and now I finish them in the midst of global pandemic. They are haunted by illness. I had thought them posted long ago until working on the post of Ruskin]

My favourite bits are actually where you can hear the voice of those Octavia Hill worked with, like this child toy worker writing to Octavia’s sister Emily. It’s curious how regularly Octavia bemoans her inability to be natural and friendly with people, to inspire them the way her sisters do (though at times she does claim it). One of the first projects Octavia and Emily worked on with the Woman’s Guild was to create a workshop for children to be able to earn money in better conditions. Sigh. Isn’t this the whole contradiction in a nutshell? The assumption that some children must work as the natural way of things?

But this is so lovely:

MARGARET -A TOY-WORKER–TO EMILY HILL. (1855)

I hope you are enjoying yourself. . . . We had such a beautiful lesson to-day about the world. I miss you very. I wish you would come back again. It is now twenty-five minutes to eight it was very dark, and I and Harriet put a farthing together, and sent L. and S. out for a halfpenny candle. . . . Oh ! our gardens are getting on so badly ! We had an Irish stew for dinner to-day. Do come back as soon as you can and I daresay you see numbers of snakes and snails, and glow-worms, and beautiful caterpillars and all sorts of insects. I daresay the leaves are falling fast. (58)

This captures the contradiction equally nicely:

LETTER ABOUT A TOY-WORKER 83 39, Devonshire Street, Queen’s Square, July 5th, 1856. To THE MOTHER OF ONE OF THE TOY-MAKERS.

DEAR MRS. J., I regret to have to tell Harriet not to return to work till Thursday next, as I have said that those children who do not earn five shillings in a week should lose three days’ work. I am very sorry to be obliged to say this, but I hope it, or a sense of the necessity of being industrious, will soon render any such law unnecessary. I shall be as pleased as proud when the day arrives, when I see all the children steady, earnest, and eager to do all they can to help those near and dear to them. I am sure their idleness results more from want of thought than anything else but they must try to overcome this ; and if they fail to do this because it is right to do so, they must be taught to do so by other means. However, I ought to say that Harriet has improved very much indeed lately ; she has been so much more gentle and steady, and more earnest about her lessons. It is therefore with much pleasure that I give her Mr. Neale’s invitation to spend a day at his house, and hope that she may grow more and more good, gentle, generous, and earnest, working for you, herself and all whom she can benefit, not only willingly but unceasingly; and I am sure she will find in quiet earnest work a happiness and peace which are far more joyous than giddiness. I ought to tell you how much I love her, and how much life and pleasure she gives to all here. (83)

But most surprising to me really, was the connections Octavia Hill had to art, her focus on drawing and painting and the close connection with Ruskin, but also acquaintance with others. Though I don’t imagine she would have got on with the Pre-Raphaelites, which makes this rather hilarious

45, Great Ormond St., July 1st, 1857.

TO EMILY. I did not go to Mr. Neale’s and the children made a horrid mess of it. Miss C. forgot the name of the station ; and they went to Beddington and had to walk eight miles, and other absurdities. I saw Rossetti last night, and learned that Ruskin is not going abroad, but to Manchester, Oxford, etc., to lecture. He starts to-day. He was at Russell Place, to see the pictures ; but did not see any of us. Rossetti was so friendly, I could not hate him, with his bright bright eyes, and recalling, as he did, dear people ; and he was so kind too. . . (97)

Of course, Kingsley sounds like a right twat as she paraphrases him here from a speech he made to an Association of women formed to help sanitary reform at their first public meeting in Willis’s rooms. It was opened by Lord Shaftesbury:

To Miranda (July 24th 1859)

“..if you think that the English race is the very noblest race the world contains; that it has, moreover, a greater power of adapting itself to every kind of climate and mode of life than any other, except the old Roman, ever had; that, besides all this, it is, on the whole, a young race, showing no signs of decay you will see that it is worth while for political economists to look on the map, and see that at least four-fifths of the world is uninhabited, and not cultivated even in the most ordinary way.”

…he looked upon the legislative part of sanitary reform with something more like despair than ever…He was not going into the question here ; it would have to be attended to, but it seemed a great way off. Therefore he hoped women would go, not only to the occupiers, but to the possessors of the house, and influence people of ” our own class.” ” And it’s so easy,” he said ” there isn’t a woman in this room who couldn’t save the lives of four or five children within the next six months ; and this, without giving up One of your daily duties, one of your pleasures, one even of your frivolities, if you choose.” (148-49)

You can’t entirely blame Octavia for her many issues when she sat around listening to such twaddle while so impressionable and young.

But there are so many glimpses of the realities of working life…she could have gone a different way, couldn’t she? She didn’t have to respond so to circumstances like this:

To Miss Baumgartner (19th August, 1860)

If you had any notion of my state of mind just now! Everything I want to do seems delayed. One girl, a darling protege of mine, says her mistress starves her will not try another place, insists upon going home. Oh such a home! irreligious, dirty, cruel, impoverished; and the girl has just had two years’ training. Well she must just try her home, and God bring her safe out of it. (184)

This embodies the spirit found throughout. Personal interest and care that come packaged with a demand for gratefulness alongside the demand that subjects put up with their station and what she and their employers believe is best for them.

This would be central to her housing projects, subject of another post. Here I will just focus on her charities, though they are to some extent intertwined.

She was part of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) briefly. She didn’t play well with others, and the reasons are various, though she did extend her networks — like getting to know Rev Samuel Barnett, who would go on to found Toynbee Hall. But her brother-in-law’s insights into the workings of COS are rather fascinating.

It was in connection with the committee that Octavia insisted most on the desirability of substituting employment for relief whenever possible…(258)

There is this also. The geographical distribution of wealth, continues the same.

Another and marked defect in the organisation of the Council led Octavia to abandon, for a time, one of her special beliefs in order to enforce another, which seemed to her of more importance. The Committees of the Society, through which direct relief work has always been carried on, were divided according to the chief London districts; and thus some Committees of the richer parishes were much more able to raise funds in their own neighbourhood than could the Eastern and Southern Committees. The consequence was that the Central Society was obliged to supply funds to supplement the needs of the Poorer districts and in return, claimed to exercise a control over the distribution of those funds, which could not be claimed over the richer Committees. (259)

They also checked her books, when her own report of the initial conditions sparked a small controversy about the liveability of her housing…there is nothing more about this. I shall have to find it elsewhere.

She disliked the thought of greater publicity, but reluctantly consented to submit her books and papers to the Special Committee appointed for this enquiry, Though they were friendly in tone, Octavia greatly disliked the visits of these gentlemen; and, when they wished to examine the tenants of the courts to find out the moral effects produced on them by the changes, Octavia put her foot down, and declined to allow this interference between herself and her “friends.”… it was the first important exhibition of that officialism which increased in Octavia her strong dislike of State or Municipal management. (262)

and finally, that small matter of the Suffragettes.

First ; it was with women that she specially co-operated in her work among the poor; and her discovery of a new outlet for their energies, and her warm appreciation of their possible capacity, led her to look on the Female Suffrage movement as a sort of red herring drawn across the path of her fellow workers, which hindered them from taking an adequate interest in those subjects with which she considered them specially fitted to deal. Secondly, even in that pacific phase of the Female Suffrage movement, there were champions of this cause who thought it more important to call attention to what women could accomplish than to undertake regular work. Thus they seemed to promote that intense love of advertising which Octavia abhorred. Lastly, there were always people who assumed that one, who had done so much efficient work, must be in favour of a change, which would enable so many other women less well provided with powers of work to accomplish more than they could now succeed in doing. (263)

I know that these are the words of her brother-in-law. Not hers. They are so very distasteful though. Like how she really feels about Greeks…my god the vomitousness

Achmetaga, Euboea
Octavia to her mother, 24th April 1880

Mr Noel was away for some days; and she and the tiny child were the only representatives of the race that rules here by education and gentleness. The rest just look, love and obey. (429-30)

A short description of her from Mr Cockerell, as pleasant as to be found in the volume…

September 5th, 1871.

First and foremost of all the guests at Ben Rhydding, in my opinion, comes Miss Octavia Hill ; an unobtrusive, plainly dressed little lady, everlastingly knitting an extraordinarily fine piece of work, whose face attracts you at first, and charms you, as you become acquainted with the power of mind and sweetness of character, to which it gives expression ; a lady of great force and energy, with a wide, open and well-stored brain, but, withal, as gently and womanly as a woman can be ; and possessed of a wonderful tact, which makes her the most instructive and the pleasantest Companion in the establishment. Miss Hill has done great things among the poor, in her own district of Marylebone…(265)

This same Mr Cockerell keeps trying to get her to read books she really doesn’t like — this is pretty awesome on Tolstoy’s Resurrection

Of course, one feels the nobility of the author’s aim , and some of the chapters are interesting as opening a view into life so utterly different from ours…But, take it as a whole, I can’t say I feel the book either refreshing or helpful; and I am a little disappointed even with the art of it. (561)

To what little I could extract about housing, see the second post. I disliked her a great deal, but there are so many holes in this accounting of her life…I really would love to know what fill them.

Maurice, C. Edmund (ed) ([1913] 2010) Life of Octavia Hill As Told in Her Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Books, Writing cities

London in Literature

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London in literature: a symposium organised by the English Syndicate of the Roehampton Institute, May 1979william blake lambeth

Academic and an intro for me to literary studies of London — or where they were in May of 1979 — and literary studies in general as I have not really thought about them since my undergraduate days long ago. I enjoyed it. I found the first essay by Simon Edwards particularly interesting in thinking through the dialectical relationship between literature and city building, he writes:

with the development of a specifically urban popular literature, arises the question of the literary work itself being seen as a distinctly metropolitan artifact and the writer as somehow deeply implicated in a complex process of making simultaneously a text, a city and an identity (1).

So simple, yet with so many ramifications. I also love that he is thinking of this globally as well, of London as the seat of empire, which articulates materially with the city and ideologically with literature:

It will be my contention that if English literature carries these ambiguous values within a consciously imperial history and culture then they may often be most fully examined in connection with the imperial capital, London. For if London, from the Elizabethan period onwards, is frequently seen wishfully as the capital of a new empire, it is also true that from roughly the end of the seventeenth century this vision is reinforced, to some extent realized, by the development of a literal global empire whose contribution to the growth of a world economy is central. London thus becomes a quite crucial topos in the whole history of Western civilization (2-3)

He is critical, to a certain extent, with a Marxist analysis that allows him to see capitalist relations, so this goes part of the way:

For this imperial city was, at one and the same time, a principal agent in the growth and spread of capitalism with (3) all its dehumanizing power and a repository or site for the formation of certain values thought of as classic and perhaps common to all phases of fully-developed civilization. This ambivalence is further complicated first from within, and later from outside, the dominant ideology of nationalism and emergent capitalism, by the growth of structured critiques, both reactionary and radical, of the system. … Thus there is a persistent conflict between London presented as the site of an extravagant display of conspicuous consumption, parasitic and productive largely of waste (as in the Augustan obsession with excrement), and London also acknowledged as a producer of real wealth through its vital contribution to national and international commerce as well as a producer of significant cultural and literary values (4).

There’s a whole lot further to go to fully critique imperialism, this concept of ‘civilisation’ and its imposition around the world, a questioning of this real wealth and literary values… What I like about it is that it begins to tie literature to the physical and ideological city, and situate these connections in a context of global exploitation.

the notion of a classical literary culture was both realized and threatened by the emergence of a modern Imperial city. Related to their sense of the crass materialism of London life, ls an anxiety about the status of imaginative literature, a principal source for the ratification of the Augustan metropolitan ideal. (21)

There is also a nice quote he gives from Defoe, describing that from a hill in Clapham, one might see,

… the whole city of London itself; the most
glorious Sight without exception, that the whole
World at present can show, or perhaps ever could
show since the Sacking of Rome in the European, and
the burning the Temple of Jerusalem…(16)

There’s a paper on Blake from David Punter, of course, who moved to the Hercules Buildings in Vauxhall in 1790. It has a great quote from Samuel Johnson’s ‘London’

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam,
And sign your will before you sup from home.
Some fiery fop, with new commission vain,
Who sleeps on brambles till he kills his man;
Some frolic drunkard, reeling from a feast,
Provokes a broil, and stabs you for a jest.
Yet e’en these heroes, mischievously gay,
Lords of the street, and terrors of the way;
Flush’d as they are with folly, youth, and wine,
Their prudent insults to the poor confine;
Afar they mark the flambeaux’s bright approach,
And shun the shining train, and golden coach.

It’s mostly looking at the poem ‘Jerusalem‘, and there’s this lovely quote about Lambeth:

HIGHGATE’S heights & Hampstead’s, to Poplar, Hackney & Bow;
To Islington & Paddington & the Brook of Albion’s River.
We builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple; from Lambeth
We began our Foundations; lovely Lambeth, O lovely Hills
Of Camberwell, we shall behold you no more in glory & pride,
For Jerusalem lies in ruins & the Furnaces of Los are builded there:
You are now shrunk up to a narrow Rock in the midst of the Sea.
But here we build Babylon on Euphrates, compell’d to build
And to inhabit, our Little-ones to clothe in armour of the gold
Of Jerusalem’s Cherubims & to forge them swords of her Altars.
I see London blind & age bent begging thro’ the Streets
Of Babylon, led by a child, his tears run down his beard.
The voice of Wandering Reuben echoes from street to street

Punter writes: ‘Lambeth, of course, Blake takes here as elsewhere as the symbolic birthplace of God, merging the connotations of the Lamb and Bethlehem’ (67). I knew it.

There’s an interesting piece on the suburbs and suburbanisation of London by B.I. Coleman, looking at Ruskin, Dickens, Kinglsey’s Alton Locke, the satire of suburban life found in Punch, The Diary of a Nobody. They were also described as the perfect breeding grounds for healthy, strong, athletic men for Britain’s elite troops establishing Empire…this in Sidney Low’s article ‘The Rise of the Suburbs’ for example, in the Contemporary Review of 1891. He writes:

The centre of population is shifting from the heart to the limbs. The life-blood is pouring into the long arms of bricks and mortar and cheap stucco that are feeling their way out to the Surrey moors, and the Essex flats, and the Hertfordshire copses…

A finer people, physically, than the inhabitants of some of those middle-class suburbs of London, which are far enough afield to permit a plentiful cult of every branch of athletics it would be hard to find. The young men of Wimbledon and Putney – great at football, cricket, golf, and most other games in which strength and activity are required – could make up a regimen which would hold its own on a battlefield against a corps d’elite selected from any army in the World.

All provided by the free market. Hurrah. I hate this guy, but he definitely seems worth a closer look.

Gabriel Pearson looks at Dickens, and mentions the ‘topographical’ tradition of Dickens critiques, which has been popular since 1870 apparently, and bringing to us works like The London that Dickens Knew. The city is there in novels to be explored, and Pearson writes:

The novel round about 1800 began, as it were, to designate territories, whole areas, as its province, and I think the analogy which underlies it is the analogy of the disovery of the new world…And you moved across both in time and also in space because there was something you registered as alien or strange. It does seem to me that the whole history of the novel may be read as an attempt to occupy and domesticate alien or strange areas in this way. As an explanation we might speculate that (and this is a very crude generalization) around 1800 everybody began to feel they were outside somewhere else, that somewhere else there was a kind of reality in some way could, possibly by some tremendous imaginative endeavour, be captured, and taken home and civilised and possessed, though nobody could quite get there. Everybody was outside: it wasn’t necessarily their home, and they did not necessarily want to return to it, but they felt that somewhere there was some source or manifestation of human relaity to which they were perpetually outsiders. I do think that one of the characteristics of Dickens, along with other novelists of this time, is that he treated London in this kind of way (95).

He explores Dickens as outsider in his novels, but doesn’t really take the above idea further than that, though I feel this is a great start to something.

John Sutherland writes on publishing itself:

If we adopt the old classification of causes (i.e. material, efficient, formal) then London can be taken as in some sense the material cause of a bulk of our significant Victorian fiction. That is to say, it stands in the same relationship to literary activity as soil and climate do to plant growth (124).

There are a couple more, it’s a good collection, though possibly outdated and some of these ideas have been taken much further since, I don’t know!

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