December 3, 1838

Octavia Hill (December 3, 1838  to August 13, 1912) was an English social reformer--one of those formidable Victorian women who affected  our own current sense of justice.

Octavia Hill was not a wealthy person but she spent her life working to improve the conditions of the urban poor. This was not the same platform as you might hear of today. Octavia Hill's ideas were more sophisticated than ours. Hill felt that living in ugly circumstances could affect the mental health of someone unable to escape those conditions. Beauty has a healing effect.

She describes in her letters, (collected and published  as Life of Octavia Hill: As Told in her Letters, edited by C. Edmund Maurice. ((1913)))  the situation of people like  a woman who worked in the darkness of a cellar, selling lumps of coal. This person did not seem to object to her own poverty and mistreatment. She did however, regret,  as Hill reports, that her cat was starving. This person, and this kind of person, benefitted from the energies  of Octavia Hill.

One way Hill worked to change the circumstances of the poor was to prevent the development of open spaces, the suburban woodlands:  the preservation today of London's Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields are examples of her triumphs.  Thus was beauty protected.

Octavia Hill's work was so effective that she became one of the three founders of the British National Trust, which is designed to protect national treasures and natural beauty.

In a letter dated November 20, 1859, Octavia wrote to her sister Miranda, she mentions that she (Octavia) is "kind to every dog and cat I see, even love them a little. I protected a little cat from some teasing children on Tuesday...."