Octavians Saw No Easy Policy Prescriptions for Society's Problems
Mr. Clayton is volunteer chairman of the Octavia Hill Society and of The Octavia Hill Birthplace Museum Trust in Wisbech, England. American membership secretary of the Society is Tina Hummel, 4730 Bradley Blvd., #A1O, Chevy Chase, MD 20815.
In South Street Philadelphia, a small nondescript building bears a proud title: The Octavia Hill Association. Few today recall the English woman who inspired this and many similar organizations. Octavia Hill was the Florence Nightingale of Victorian housing. Emphasizing personal involvement and small-scale operations, she demonstrated that it was possible to rent houses to the disadvantaged poor, uplift them, and still make a profit for the owner. Though she aspired only to “free a few poor people from the tyranny and influence of a low class of landlords,” by the end of her life in 1912 she had developed a volunteer-based initiative that had worldwide influence. Her methods were copied in Holland, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and America.
Behind the simple day-to-day humanity of her work lay an ethical strategy. Octavia Hill was influenced by John Ruskin, the English art critic and philosopher. Ruskin held that a root cause of society’s malaise was the absence of routine personal contact between classes. The poor lived their lives in obscure, impenetrable corners of cities. Those who dictated policy and formed opinions knew nothing of them save what they read or assumed to be true. Many city missions were patronizing, or conditioned their aid on conversion or adherence to a particular religion.
Octavia Hill worked with her tenants not for them. The poor, she said, should be regarded “primarily as husbands, wives, sons and daughters, members of households, as we are ourselves, instead of as a separate class.” All individuals were worth an effort. “Before our influence can be human, natural, and helpful, before our elaborate network of organization can be anything but harmful, these widespread masses which form the poor of our towns must be to us again separate human beings, with individual histories, characters, hopes, longings, temptations. It has been ordained that each of us has a distinctive face and form known to those who love us, and which enwraps a soul as distinct.”
Central to her work was the recruitment, training, and efficient utilization of handpicked volunteers to manage housing for owners. She said, “We have to be the poor man’s friend if we are to be his benefactor.” For Octavia Hill and John Ruskin, the only way that such friendship could be achieved was by personal contact over a long period. The method chosen to build this relationship was the routine contact between landlord’s agent and tenant. The Tenth Annual report of the Octavia Hill Association of Philadelphia in 1906 identified the three inseparable factors of housing management, “the house, the friendly rent collector or agent, and the tenant.” “The house,” it continued, “was never to be considered apart from the tenant and the kind offices of the agent; in fact, the three were to form practically a unit—the house existing to be rented by the agent to, and for the use of, the tenant, never for rent-value alone. The agent was to be the guardian, as it were, of the well-being of tenant, house, and landlord, between whose trebly distinct yet united interests there could, in a most important sense, be no division.”
The “fellow workers” in the field were but one type of volunteer utilized by the Octavia Hill method. The others included property owners who volunteered to forfeit the full rental value of their property. Octavia Hill needed enlightened landlords who were prepared to accept a limited but assured rental return on their property. Once when she was talking to a group of peers in England, Octavia Hill was reproached by a Duke who said, “Miss Hill, you wish to tax our property.” She replied, “No, your Grace, I wish you to tax yourselves.”
Skeptical of State Action
Octavia Hill had little faith in state action. She had considerable respect for politics at a local, grassroots level, but her view was that the duty of national politicians was just to create and sustain conditions for individuals to prosper. She pointed out that she had known two prime ministers (Lord Salisbury, who was a personal friend, and Gladstone), and neither of them had any experience with poorer people. Such ignorance, she insisted, could not produce sound policy.
As large-scale social policies were implemented with vigor in the early years of this century, Octavia became a lone voice of dissent, pointing out with prophetic vision the inherent pitfalls. She wrote, “It is, of course, true that there are certain great human needs that may be met en bloc and from a distance, but it is curious how few they are, how badly they are met unless it be by those with much individual sympathy, and how curiously little joy or gratitude they bring, and how little self-reliance, it is the gift to the man himself, from a man, which reaches him. Lowell is for ever right ‘the gift without the giver is bare.’”
“It is not by widespreading changes, it is not by more legal enactments but face to face and heart to heart that pauperism must be dealt with,” she wrote. “It is the friendly help that takes the degradation out of it.” She urged that volunteers “not attempt too much, but take some one little bit of work, and doing it simply, thoroughly, and lovingly, wait patiently for the gradual spread of good.”
For Octavians, there were no easy policy prescriptions for the problems of society. Redemption could come only from concerted and sustained action by individuals. The value of their work was eloquently pleaded by historian Fullerton Waldo in his 1917 account of the Philadelphia Octavia Hill Association. “It is an investment in human lives, and it underwrites the welfare of the city, the country, the world in the age to come by assuring the health and happiness of the unborn.”
