BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Great Englishwoman
Octavia Hill. By E. Moberly Bell. (Constable. iss.)
IT is the aim of this book to trace in sufficient detail the life of a very potent woman of the Victorian age and to explain her manifold activities and aspirations. It ma Y be said at once that Miss Moberly Bell has fulfilled an exacting task with conspicuous success.
Octavia Hill was born in 1838 and died in 1912. She is remem- bered as one who loved her fellow men,especially the almost destitute; as a pioneer in housing reform and house management ; as an ardent defender of open spaces in our cities ; as a guardian of public rights in rural commons and footpaths ; as one of the first to advocate a Green Belt round London ; and as a -co-founder of two great bodies, the Charity Organisation Society and the National Trust. From small beginnings the National Trust has developed to so tremendous an extent that it must now be counted as her greatest monument— hers and that of her two co-founders, Canon Rawnsley and Sir Robert Hunter. • During her early years the Hill family underwent acute adversity and they were plunged from comparative affluence into such indigence as sometimes actually to be short of food. They had all to fight hard for a living. In Octavia's case this severe disoipline was not altogether a misfortune. It enabled her from her own experience, while still but a girl, to understand and fully sympathise with the poor and the struggling. As she grew older she devoted all her energies to their assistance, not by any facile almsgiving, but by a larger and far more difficult kind of charity, in which firmness, example and close personal contact played the chief part.
Before she was fifteen she had come under the spell of Ruskin's writings. When she was seventeen she was admitted to his friendship. During -the ensuing years he enlarged her horizon gave her paid employment, encouraged her housing projects and backed them generously. This continued for twenty years, but in 1877, when Octavia had become more self:reliant, there was an unfortunate breach which, though healed on paper through the mediation of a friend, kept them separated until his death in 19oo. The other great influence on her early maturity came from Frederick Denison Maurice, founder of the Working Men's College, whose son Edmund married one of her sisters. These two men were her sun and moon. Prominent -among her ever-increasing band of collaborators were her beloved sister Miranda, Emma Cons (founder afterwards of the Old Vic. as we now know and rejoice in it), William Shaen, Samuel Barnett, Ingham Brooke, Sir Charles Loch and Harriot Yorke. To the self-effacing devotion of the last of these she owed much of her mental and bodily strength during the last thirty years of her life.
Like her four sisters and their very valiant mother, Octavia Hill was small of stature. She was, however, sturdily built. Miss Moberly Bell quotes an exact picture of her by Henry Nevinson when presiding at a committee of a working boys' Cadet Corps (still in being after more than half a century) of which he was one of the officers : "I used to compare her in my mind to Queen Elizabeth among her pirates and explorers. For the solid little figure with powerful head, masses of loose grey hair, large, benign, but watchful brown eyes, and mouth closing tight like an unyielding steel trap when she was displeased, displayed all the great Queen's indomitable resolution, Power of command, personal affection or dislike' and a scrupulous regard for every halfpenny spent or received." Emphasis must be Placed on the word benign, for though she was inflexible in up- holding essential principles Octavio. Hill was gentle and womanly. She was never self-centred: She avoided fame. . She detested the limelight. Yet she unconsciously dominated any -ordinary company Into which she came. One is reminded of Gorki's description of Tolvoy, who was a smallish man entering a room full of people and by his mere personality appearing to be a giant.
Though all her principal fellow-workers are now no more, some lesser associates yet survive to cherish their leader's memory. One of these, whose privilege it was to witness many incidents in her eficent career, has detected no error in this narrative, no false dgement (unless concerning Ruskin), no exaggeration and no everything of any importance. From first to last every;ing is in focus, and the story of a long life dedicated to a succession of great auses is unfolded step by step with clarity and With a notable sense
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