“A Kind of Manager not Hitherto Existing”: Octavia Hill and the Professional Philanthropist

Abstract

Until recently, most academic and quasi-academic work on Octavia Hill (1838–1912) has evinced a distinct partisan bias. Her immense stature in her own time, her controversial positions, and the intense affection and loyalty borne toward her by a large number of friends and fellow-workers, determined that for at least two subsequent generations of housing and social workers, Hill was the iconic figure either to revere or revile. Consequently, even through most of the twentieth century, Hill was invoked with scorn by the left and with adulation by the right in debates over social housing and social work. Hill’s persistent opposition to state-subsidized housing, her insistence on the primacy of the moral reform of the poor, her preference for small cottages over large blocks of tenements, and her rhetoric of paternalist squirarchy have earned her the opprobrium of socialists of every description.1 These same characteristics made her a darling of conservatives calling for a retrenchment of the welfare state and a revitalization of private-sector responses to the housing need.2