Abstract
Octavia Hill (1838–1912) was a housing and social reformer who took it upon herself to improve the lot of the Victorian working classes. Her reforms included improvements to ventilation, drainage and redecoration – helpfully called ‘The Octavia Hill method’ by her biographer Gillian Darley, who also contributes to this text. Hill is also known for her role in helping to establish the National Trust in 1895 along with Sir Richard Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley. Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles has emerged as an output from the Institute of Historical Research conference of the same name, looking at the life of Octavia Hill and the impact she had on British society. The conference also marked the centenary of Hill’s death in 2012. The book was ‘prompted by a recognition of Hill’s complexity and of how a reappraisal was timely, based on careful reading of works by her and those who knew her, as well as sensitivity to the context which she worked and a resistance to exceptionalism’ (p. 24). The main aim of the book is admirably set out by the editors Baigent and Cowell: The book, then, is offered to those interested in women’s history, environmental history, social history, art history, and the history of ideas and religion. Its aim is to present Hill as worthy of study in her own right, and, inevitably and perhaps little as she would have liked it, as emblematic of the women of her time. (p. 26)
This is an ambitious project to undertake but Baigent and Cowell’s treatment is elegant. There are a number of books already written on Hill and her work with the National Trust but this publication aims higher. The editors are unapologetic in giving Hill the space she so rightfully deserves. This should be the vision of all academics writing women’s history. All women are ‘worthy of study in [their] own right’. Hermione Lee has touched on this subject in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2008) and provides food for thought about women’s biographies and archives of women’s lives.
The text deals with a range of issues, with the book divided into six sections concerning Hill’s life, art, nature, environmentalism or preservation, legislation and finally, her legacy. Considering the broad range of essays presented on Hill’s life and impact, the thematic approach allows us to explore the various aspects of her interests, the campaigns she was involved with as well as the work she did in helping to establish the National Trust. Gillian Darley, Hill’s prolific biographer, also contributes to this edition by providing the context of Hill’s life and the reasons for her decision to become a social reformer.
The final section is of particular interest since it is here that Ben Cowell brings together the overarching aims of the text. In the final chapter he examines the relationship between the National Trust and the government in the Trust’s earliest decades. This essay is not based on a paper given at the conference in 2012 but places Hill within the wider context of the nineteenth century in a way the other essays do not. Hill’s association with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain’s first female doctor, and Millicent Fawcett, Anderson’s sister and a prominent suffragette, is briefly highlighted in this section, implying that her influence and interests lay beyond the preservation of historic buildings (p. 302). The mention of Hill’s connection with the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science begs the question of whether she was more involved with social campaigning, particularly within the medical community, than previously thought. This certainly deserves more study. Indeed, this is not the first instance of Hill being discussed in relation to other women. Nancy Boyd’s (1982) Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale: Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World is an extraordinary example of this type of context of contextualization. However, the present book goes a step further by giving Hill her own voice and space in which to be celebrated. In the final chapter Cowell also provides evidence of Hill’s impact on the policies of architectural preservation, again an aspect of Hill’s legacy where further research could be carried out.
Throughout this book there are a great range of sources used by all the contributors. The only fault to be found is that there is not a compiled bibliography of all these sources. This would be beneficial to researchers looking to conduct further research on Hill or those wanting to draw more explicit links between her various interests and associations. Some effort has been made in this text to create a more colourful picture of the life and work of Octavia Hill than is usually given, but more work needs to be done. I would also argue that more historians of women’s lives should adopt the approach of Baigent and Cowell in communicating the lives of women well beyond the nineteenth century.