Octavia hill education

Source: Hill, Life , facing p. Twice-widowed, and with six children already, James had taken Caroline Southwood Smith, an educationist and writer, as his third wife.

Octavia hill garden

It was an ideal meeting of minds: in the couple opened an infants' school together, which Caroline ran on the advanced methods of the Swiss education reformer, Johann Pestalozzi. The building still exists in Wisbech today, as part of a local theatre complex. Five more children would be born into the Hill family, including Octavia.

But James was bankrupted in the financial crash of , and took it very badly, leaving his wife to cope with the newly enlarged clan. After a while he settled the family in Finchley, near his Highgate home, taking one of the girls Octavia's next elder sister, Gertrude into his own home, and providing a second home for them all. He had a great influence on Octavia when she was growing up.

An advocate for public health reform, and daily exposed to the problems of urban poverty, her made her aware of the major social problems of the day, including child labour and the lack of proper housing provision for the lower classes. He also introduced her to many of the thinkers of the day, since his house was "filled with the independently minded, usually nonconformist intellectuals who were their friends, including the Leigh Smiths, the Howitts, and the Foxes, as well as interesting visitors such as Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens.

Little wonder that, educated by her capable and public-spirited mother and with this further stimulus, Octavia developed a strong social conscience. When her mother took over the management of the Ladies' Guild, a co-operative crafts workshop in Holborn, the family moved to Bloomsbury and fourteen-year-old Octavia pitched in, taking responsibility for the ragged-school girls who were employed at the workshop, and coming into contact with F.

Maurice and the Christian socialists. Their influence on her, too, cannot be overestimated. Although she would avoid bringing religious ideas into her work, there is no doubt that "a quiet evangelical fervour" underpinned it Wohl