Parliament and many concerned reformers had been attempting to improve the housing of the working classes since the early 1830s. When Hill began her work, the model dwelling movement had been in existence for twenty years, royal and select committees had sat to examine the problems of urban well-being, and the first of many tranches of legislation aimed at improving working class housing had been passed. From Hill's point of view these had all failed the poorest members of the working class, the unskilled labourers. She found that their landlords routinely ignored their obligations towards their tenants, and that the tenants were too ignorant and oppressed to better themselves.
Housing for the poor
Octavia Hill
Octavia Hill | Housing for the poor
Yes, Hill began her work, the model dwelling movement had been in existence for twenty years, royal and select committees had sat to examine the problems of urban well-being, and the first of many tranches of legislation aimed at improving working class housing had been passed. She  provide housing for poor She build housing for the poor She tried to find new homes for them
where do guinea pigs come from in the wild
user
They originated in the Andes of South America
assistant
how do they look like?
user
Guinea pigs are large for rodents; the common pet breeds weigh between when full grown and measure between in length
assistant
which club is associated with it?
user
Cavy clubs dedicated to the showing and breeding of guinea pigs have been established worldwide.
assistant
what reference do they have in literature?
user
"The Fairy Caravan", a novel by Beatrix Potter, and Michael Bond's Olga da Polga series for children, both feature guinea pigs as the protagonist. Another appearance is in "The Magician's Nephew" by C. S. Lewis: in the first of his "The Chronicles of Narnia" series, a guinea pig is the first creature to travel to the Wood between the Worlds.
assistant
is there any specific program for their breeding?
user
Yes, Peruvian research universities, especially La Molina National Agrarian University, began experimental programs
assistant
you have mentioned three authors above; has the first one done any scientific illustrations?
user
Yes, a collection of her fungus paintings at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Perth
assistant
and any conservation work?
user
She supported he National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.
assistant
who founded this trust?
user
Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley
assistant
can you mention some of its art collections?
user
"Self-portrait wearing a white feathered bonnet"
assistant
which house or garden comes under this trust?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
what are some of the collections of the above mentioned museum?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
you have mentioned three founders above; who is the first one?
user
He was an English social reformer, whose main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities, especially London, in the second half of the nineteenth century
assistant
did he do anything for the poor class?
user
Parliament and many concerned reformers had been attempting to improve the housing of the working classes since the early 1830s. When Hill began her work, the model dwelling movement had been in existence for twenty years, royal and select committees had sat to examine the problems of urban well-being, and the first of many tranches of legislation aimed at improving working class housing had been passed. From Hill's point of view these had all failed the poorest members of the working class, the unskilled labourers. She found that their landlords routinely ignored their obligations towards their tenants, and that the tenants were too ignorant and oppressed to better themselves.
Octavia Hill | Housing for the poor
She tried to find new homes for her charges, but there was a severe shortage of available property, and Hill decided that her only solution was to become a landlord herself. John Ruskin, who was interested in the co-operative guild, knew Hill from her work as his copyist and was impressed by her. As an aesthete and a humanitarian he was affronted by the brutal ugliness of the slums. In 1865, having inherited a substantial sum of money from his father, he acquired for £750 the leases of three cottages of six rooms each in Paradise Place, Marylebone. Ruskin placed these houses, which were "in a dreadful state of dirt and neglect", under Hill's management.
Octavia Hill | Housing for the poor
Under the slogan "Bring Beauty Home to the Poor" it aimed to bring art, books, music and open spaces into the lives of the urban poor. For a short period it flourished and expanded, and although it declined after a few years, it was a template for the National Trust, 20 years later. Before that, however, Hill was engaged in a campaign in 1883 to stop the construction of railways from the quarries in the fells overlooking Buttermere, in the English Lake District, with damaging effect on the unspoilt scenery. The campaign was led by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, who secured the support of Ruskin, Hill, and Sir Robert Hunter, solicitor to the Commons Preservation Society.
Octavia Hill | Open spaces
He told her that investors might be attracted to such schemes if a five percent annual return could be secured. In 1866 Ruskin acquired the freehold of five more houses for Hill to manage in Freshwater Place, Marylebone. "The Times" recorded, "The houses faced a bit of desolate ground occupied by dilapidated cowsheds and manure heaps. The needful repairs and cleaning were carried out, the waste land was turned into a playground where Mr. Ruskin had some trees planted."
Octavia Hill | Housing for the poor
Octavia Hill (3 December 1838 – 13 August 1912) was an English social reformer, whose main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities, especially London, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born into a family with a strong commitment to alleviating poverty, she herself grew up in straitened circumstances owing to the financial failure of her father's businesses. With no formal schooling, she worked from the age of 14 for the welfare of working people. Hill was a moving force behind the development of social housing, and her early friendship with John Ruskin enabled her to put her theories into practice with the aid of his initial investment.
Octavia Hill | Introduction
She believed in self-reliance, and made it a key part of her housing system that she and her assistants knew their tenants personally and encouraged them to better themselves. She was opposed to municipal provision of housing, believing it to be bureaucratic and impersonal. Another of Hill's concerns was the availability of open spaces for poor people. She campaigned against development on existing suburban woodlands, and helped to save London's Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields from being built on. She was one of the three founders of the National Trust, set up to preserve places of historic interest or natural beauty for the enjoyment of the British public.
Octavia Hill | Introduction
The number of homes managed by Hill continued to grow. Although Ruskin had turned against her in a bout of mental instability, she found a new supporter, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who handed over to her the management of their housing estates in several poor areas of south London. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hill's women workers were no longer unpaid volunteers but trained professionals. Hill's influence spread beyond the properties under her own control. Her ideas were taken up and copied, with her enthusiastic support, in continental Europe and the United States of America. Beatrice Webb said that she "first became aware of the meaning of the poverty of the poor," while staying with her sister, who was a rent collector for Octavia Hill in the East End.
Octavia Hill | Later years
Despite her opposition to interference by national or local government in the provision of housing, Hill had to cope with the newly created London County Council and the involvement of the council and other local authorities in providing housing for the poor. In 1884 a Royal commission on the housing of the working classes was set up, but the prime minister, W.E. Gladstone, and his ministerial colleagues vetoed a proposal to include Hill among the members of the commission. The municipal authorities quickly surpassed her in the number of properties under their management.
Octavia Hill | Later years
Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, was taken incognito on a tour of some of Hill's properties, and she translated Hill's "Homes of the London Poor" into German. Among those whom Hill trained was her assistant and secretary, Maud Jeffery, who was later engaged by the Commissioners of Crown Lands to run new housing estates in London on Octavia Hill's lines. Even some local authorities, despite Hill's distrust, followed her model: some of the earliest examples of municipal council housing, at Kensington and Camberwell, were run on her lines, with the acquisition of working-class houses, and their gradual improvement, without evictions or demolitions.
Octavia Hill | Later years
She received no formal schooling: her mother educated the family at home. The family settled in a small cottage in Finchley, now a north London suburb, but then a village. Octavia Hill was impressed and moved by Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor", a book that portrayed the daily lives of slum dwellers. She was also strongly influenced by the theologian, Anglican priest and social reformer F. D. Maurice, who was a family friend. She began her work on behalf of London's poor by helping to make toys for Ragged school children, and serving as secretary of the women's classes at the Working Men's College in Bloomsbury in central London.
Octavia Hill | Early years
Because these systems did not encourage recipients to work, she regarded them as "a profligate use of public funds." Under her methods, personal responsibility was encouraged. She insisted on dealing with arrears promptly; she appointed reliable caretakers; she took up on references of prospective tenants, and visited them in their homes; she paid careful attention to allocations and the placing of tenants, with regard to size of families and the size and location of the accommodation to be offered; and she made no rules that could not be properly enforced. In 1884, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners recognised her enlightened approach and turned to her to manage and reform their slum properties in South London, which were notorious for poverty and petty crime.
Octavia Hill | Housing management
She was a founder member of the Charity Organisation Society (now the charity Family Action) which organised charitable grants and pioneered a home-visiting service that formed the basis for modern social work. She was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1905.
Octavia Hill | Introduction
The family's comfortably prosperous life was disrupted by James Hill's financial problems and his mental collapse. In 1840 he was declared bankrupt. Caroline Hill's father gave the family financial support, and took on some of Hill's paternal role. Southwood Smith was a health and welfare reformer concerned with a range of social issues including child labour in mines and the housing of the urban poor. Caroline Hill held similar views on social reform, and her interest in progressive education, influenced by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Southwood Smith's daily experience in his work at the London Hospital in the East End inspired Octavia Hill's concern for the poorest in early Victorian London.
Octavia Hill | Early years
The Society through its four committees provided art, music, books and open spaces to the working class poor, around the slogan "Bring Beauty Home to the Poor". This involved, at first, artistic decoration of hospitals, schools, literary institutes and working-class clubs. In 1876 her sister Octavia Hill became treasurer. There were numerous branches around the country, generally formed from around 1877 onwards, and one branch was supported by William Morris. Another notable supporter was the Arts and Crafts architect Lady Mary Lovelace. The Society's Open Space Committee was influential in saving numerous stretches of heathland and woodland in London, that would otherwise have been built on, notably in 1890 the opening of Vauxhall Park.
Miranda Hill | Introduction
Hill considered that such an organisation would be more like the "real thing" than such existing outfits as the Church Lads' Brigade and therefore more attractive to young men "who had passed the age of make-believe". She invited a serving officer of the Derbyshire Regiment to set up the company, and such was its popularity that its numbers had to be capped at 160 cadets. Hill's principles were summed up in an article of 1869: "Where a man persistently refuses to exert himself, external help is worse than useless." She was an outspoken critic of the principles of "outdoor relief" or the Speenhamland system of poor relief as operated by various Poor Law Boards.
Octavia Hill | Housing management
Among Hill's concerns was that her tenants, and all urban workers, should have access to open spaces. She believed in "the life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air and blue sky." In 1883 she wrote: She campaigned hard against building on existing suburban woodlands, and helped to save Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields from development. She was the first to use the term "Green Belt" for the protected rural areas surrounding London. Three hills in Kent (Mariners Hill, Toys Hill and Ide Hill) which she helped to protect from development form part of the belt. In 1876 Hill became the treasurer of the Kyrle Society, founded in that year by her eldest sister, Miranda, as a "Society for the Diffusion of Beauty".
Octavia Hill | Open spaces
In the mid to late 19th century, philanthropists like Octavia Hill and charities like the Peabody Trust focused on building adequate housing for the working classes at affordable rates (George Peabody built his first improved housing for the "artisans and laboring poor" on Commercial Street in 1864). The Metropolitan Board of Works (the dominant authority before the LCC), was empowered to undertake clearances and to enforce overcrowding and other such standards on landlords by a stream of legislation including the Labouring Classes Dwelling Houses Acts of 1866 and 1867. Overcrowding was also defined as a public health 'nuisance' beginning in 1855, which allowed Medical Officers to report landlords in violation to the Board of Health.
19th-century London | Poverty
From 1875 onwards, Hunter had been Hill's legal adviser on the protection of open spaces in London. Both he and Rawnsley, building on an idea put forward by Ruskin, conceived of a trust that could buy and preserve places of natural beauty and historic interest for the nation.
Octavia Hill | Open spaces
After leaving Oxford, Rawnsley went to work among the urban poor in London. He was appointed lay-chaplain to the Newport Market Refuge, a hostel for the destitute, in the parish of St Mary's, Soho, an insalubrious part of London known for prostitution and poverty. Ruskin introduced him to Octavia Hill, the pioneer of social housing, and Rawnsley added to his workload the role of rent-collector for Hill's colleague Emma Cons. Under the strain of his various activities he suffered a nervous breakdown. At Hill's suggestion he went to the Lake District to recuperate, staying first with his cousins at Wray Castle, Westmorland, and then with Thring at Grasmere and finally with Hill's friends the Fletcher family at their house near Ambleside.
Hardwicke Rawnsley | London and Bristol
In connection to them, the teacher Sofi Nilsson co-founded with her an education of Family and consumer science for girls by letting them cook for the cottages (1889). In 1889, she introduced the Octavia Hill system for healthy residences for working people.
Anna Hierta-Retzius | Philanthropic work
Today it owns several of the homes, including Gable Cottages, designed by Elijah Hoole, who worked with Hill for many years. Hill's determination to provide community space can still be seen in the shape of the Red Cross site in Southwark (1888), among others. The Octavia Hill Society website states that with a community hall, and soundly maintained attractive houses, Hill here anticipated the fundamental ingredients of town planning by some 15 years. The Settlement Movement (creating integrated mixed communities of rich and poor) grew directly out of Hill's work. Her colleagues Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, founded Toynbee Hall, the first university-sponsored settlement, which together with the Women's University Settlement (later called the Blackfriars Settlement) continues to serve local communities.
Octavia Hill | Legacy and memorials
Pauper asylums gave refuge for the insane of the poorer classes, and care at private establishments could be bought by the rich, the middle classes neither deserved the former nor could afford the latter. Charity for the poor demeaned its recipients: as far as possible people should be assisted to help themselves. The proposed asylum was not intended for the permanently insane, but as a refuge in which the temporarily deranged should be assisted to resume their working lives. At that meeting Holloway told Shaftesbury that he intended to spend his fortune on a single building and in a single benefaction.
Holloway Sanatorium | The founder
When John Singer Sargent's portrait of her was presented by her fellow-workers in 1898, Hill made a speech in which she said, "When I am gone, I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. New circumstances require various efforts, and it is the spirit, not the dead form, that should be perpetuated. ... We shall leave them a few houses, purified and improved, a few new and better ones built, a certain amount of thoughtful and loving management, a few open spaces..." But, she said, more important would be "the quick eye to see, the true soul to measure, the large hope to grasp the mighty issues of the new and better days to come – greater ideals, greater hope, and patience to realize both." The Horace Street Trust, founded by Hill, became a model for many subsequent housing associations and developed into the present trust that bears her name, Octavia Housing.
Octavia Hill | Legacy and memorials
Octavia Hill, the social reformer, a moving force behind the development of social housing and a founder of the National Trust, exerted a strong influence on Benton Fletcher. In 1889 she pioneered the Cadet movement in South London as a means of improving the social conditions of working class boys. Elijah Hoole, an Arts and Crafts movement architect, built the Cadets' Drill Hall, Red Cross Hall, which was decorated by Walter Crane, with painted panels of scenes of working class heroism, adjacent to Red Cross Cottages, Southwark. Red Cross Hall was also used for concerts, including a yearly performance of Handel's "Messiah".
Benton Fletcher | Octavia Hill, Cadets, Social work
However, the landlady supported him saying that his presence had a good effect on the conduct of the other customers, and his Bishop turned a blind eye for 51 years. In contrast to other more relaxed clergy he filled the church with his preaching and set up the first Sunday School in the county. Distressed by local poverty he also became Rector of Spratton, a neighbouring village to the south. There he organised a clothing and sick club and employed a woman to teach sewing, all based on his principle of helping the poor to help themselves. With income from the books he wrote, he built six Almshouses in Creaton village.
Highgate House | History
Emma, however, desired to be shown up to Mrs Rich's room, where she had a very comfortable cup of tea and a chat with her. Fanny came up to ask Emma whether she would come down and see Mr William Wilberforce but she declined, and I dare say Mackintosh thought her a great fool for doing so." In 1843 the house was taken by Charles Trevelyan, then Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and brother-in-law of Lord Macaulay whose favourite sister Hannah he had married in 1834. The Trevelayans lived at Western Lodge for eight years with their three children, and Macaulay was a frequent and much loved visitor.
The Society for the Relief of the Homeless Poor | Notable residents
Hill introduced Henrietta to the writings of John Ruskin, as well as many influential people similarly interested in improving the condition of London's poor.
Henrietta Barnett | Early life
He frequently highlighted the problems of the very poorest in society when putting questions to Margaret Thatcher and her ministers.
Frank Haynes | Introduction
In April 1893 Lansbury achieved his first elective office when he became a Poor Law guardian for the district of Poplar. In place of the traditionally harsh workhouse regime that was the norm, Lansbury proposed a programme of reform, whereby the workhouse became "an agency of help instead of a place of despair", and the stigma of poverty was removed. Lansbury was one of a minority socialist bloc which was often able, through its energy and commitment, to win support for its plans. Education for the poor was one of Lansbury's major concerns. He helped to transform the Forest Gate District School, previously a punitive establishment run on quasi-military lines, into a proper place of education that became the Poplar Training School, and was still in existence more than half a century later.
George Lansbury | Poor Law guardian
In 1875, after a particularly difficult year, the 28-year-old Kate Potter left her family home and went to London to enlist in the activities of Octavia Hill and started training for the Charity Organization Society in Whitechapel, as well as working as an organiser of an East End boys' clubs, before joining Samuel Augustus and Henrietta Barnett in their philanthropic work. Her parents frowned upon her decision, as did her elder sister Lawrencina, but ultimately granted her a small allowance which enabled her to settle in Great College Street in Westminster. She stayed in touch with her family and they often complained about her forcing them to attend "poor people's parties", which they escaped as soon as they could.
Catherine Courtney, Baroness Courtney of Penwith | Work in the slums
And I was just amazed. So out of curiosity I asked a young man from that village to show me the poorest house. He thought for a bit, and then he said, 'We don't have any poor houses.' The same person I heard eight years later saying to a tourist, 'Oh, if you could only help us Ladakhis, we're so poor!' And what had happened is that in the intervening eight years he had been bombarded with all these one-dimensional images of life in the West. He'd seen people with fast cars, you know, looking as though they never worked, and with lots of money.
Helena Norberg-Hodge | Ladakh
Booth publicly criticised the claims of H. M. Hyndman, the leader of the Social Democratic Federation, Britain's first socialist party. In the "Pall Mall Gazette" of 1885, Hyndman stated that 25% of Londoners lived in abject poverty. The survey of life and labor began with a pilot study in Tower Hamlets. Booth then hired numerous researchers to assist with the full study of the whole of London, which investigated the three main topics of poverty, occupations, and religion. Among his researchers were his cousin Beatrice Potter (Beatrice Webb) and the chapter on women's work was conducted by the budding economist Clara Collet.
Charles Booth (social reformer) | Social Research
Around 1955, Jean founded the "Noble Village of Charity," where he builds free homes for the poor who lived with his family in the streets: "There, I understood the meaning of the "Via Crucis", the distress of the Christ that we can only imagine. The suffering of our brothers caused by those who make no effort to sacrifice for the other. I trust in the Divine Providence. I have never been a rich man, but I know God does not forsake those who serve his neighbor. Once, I received a small amount of money that made possible the purchase of a lot of land and the necessary building material.
John Pozzobon | Commitment to the poorest
In the November 1883 issue of "National Review" Conservative Party leader Lord Salisbury wrote an article titled "Labourers' and Artisans' Dwellings" in which he argued that the poor conditions of working class housing were injurious to morality and health. ""Laissez-faire" is an admirable doctrine but it must be applied on both sides", Salisbury argued, as Parliament had enacted new building projects (such as the Thames Embankment) which had displaced working-class people and was responsible for "packing the people tighter": Thousands of families have only a single room to dwell in, where they sleep and eat, multiply, and die... It is difficult to exaggerate the misery which such conditions of life must cause, or the impulse they must give to vice.
Housing of the Working Classes Act 1885 | Background
Throughout his life, Gaskell worked for numerous local charitable concerns to alleviate poverty, improve living conditions and reduce the transmission of disease, particularly epidemic cholera and typhus. During the 1830s–1860s, some of the worst conditions for the poor in England were to be found in Manchester. In 1845, Engels described one of the poorest slums, not far from the Gaskells' house: 'ruinous cottages behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, [...] dark wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench...' It was also a city of extreme social inequality between the so-called 'millocracy' and the workers; Elizabeth Gaskell once described an acquaintance attending a ball wearing £400 of lace and £10,000 in diamonds.
William Gaskell | Charitable works
"if she will ever maintain the rights of the poor as the rights of the rich; will ever look to the interest of the laboring classes, the men whose property, though small in degree to them, are equal to those of the richer classes. She will maintain their rights and will maintain the rights of the agriculturalists, maintain the rights of the mechanics, the farmers, the lawyers and all-extending equality to all her people the entire extent of her domain..."
Augustus L. Hart | Quotes
The suffering of the poor was described in popular fiction by moralist authors such as Charles Dickens – most famously "Oliver Twist" (1837-9) and echoed the Christian Socialist values of the time, which soon found legal expression in the Public Health Act of 1848. As the slum clearance movement gathered pace, deprived areas such as Old Nichol were fictionalised to raise awareness in the middle classes in the form of moralist novels such as "A Child of the Jago" (1896) resulting in slum clearance and reconstruction programmes such as the Boundary Estate (1893-1900) and the creation of charitable trusts such as the Peabody Trust founded in 1862 and Joseph Rowntree Foundation (1904) which still operate to provide decent housing today.
Slum | History
With the Soroptimist club she gave talks to her fellow members, praising the influence of Octavia Hill and explaining that she was interested more in mental health than physical health. She advocated an ordered life and a happy atmosphere for everyone. As the vice president of the Social Hygiene Council, she worked to ensure that the people of Bristol could give better sex education to their children, without shocking them. She did this in part by hosting a series of lectures called "Sex Education and the Child", investing the profits from the lectures in providing educational materials for those who could not afford them.
Elizabeth Casson | Societies
Criticism of the Poor Law grew in the early nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars with France, especially among political economists. Thomas Malthus thought any benevolence to the poor was self-defeating; the only check on the numbers of the poor was poverty. Furthermore, the Poor Law gave a right to relief only in the parish where the claimant had a right of settlement, obtained by birth or by prolonged residence: it undesirably limited the mobility of labour. Without the Poor Law there would be "a few more instances of severe distress," but "the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present." However, he was one of the first to advocate so called 'indoor relief' in workhouses for the poor as opposed to outdoor relief (handouts in money or in kind, with recipients not under the control of poor-law authorities).
Opposition to the English Poor Laws | Criticism of the Elizabethan Poor Law
"In one or another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject—at the heart of almost everything he wrote until "Homage to Catalonia"." He fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the 14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. His experiences there were the basis of his essay "How the Poor Die", published in 1946. He chose not to identify the hospital, and indeed was deliberately misleading about its location. Shortly afterwards, he had all his money stolen from his lodging house. Whether through necessity or to collect material, he undertook menial jobs such as dishwashing in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in "Down and Out in Paris and London".
George Orwell | London and Paris
Until Charity Commission amalgamation in 1908, Wonersh had charity endowments paying out for its poor: John Austen of Shalford left money for poor relief in 1620. Henry Chennell of Wonersh left land whose produce was to be devoted to putting six poor boys to school from 1672. A Mr Gwynne of London gave land and bank stock in 1698 to put four poor boys to school and to distribute bread to fifteen poor persons every Sunday after service. Manorial fortunes became more muted from 1700–1900 during the Industrial Revolution – seeing almost all of their farm lands being sold up for lack of scale or produce.
Wonersh | Post Renaissance
The idea was that the poor received a good education, but at a rate that they could afford. This was in direct contrast to the local Ragged School which was funded by charitable donations and provided a form of free education and often food and clothing to the poorest children. However, the poor quality of education at the Ragged School was a cause of much controversy in the Croydon Times, the local paper, leading eventually to an editorial. The insistence that even the poor had to pay some thing was most definitely not because Fitzwygram did not care about the poor, but rather that he wanted to show them how to work their way out of poverty.
St Andrew's Church of England High School | Reverend Fitzroy John Fitzwygram
Rent was collected on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Rent accounts were balanced in the afternoons and arrangements were made with contractors for repairs. On Thursdays and Fridays arrears were pursued, contractors' invoices paid, new tenancy lettings and tenants' moves organised. If any of Hill's assistants had spare time, whether during normal working hours or in frequent voluntary after-hours working, it was used to promote tenants' associations and after-work and children's after-school clubs and societies. In 1859, Hill created the Southwark detachment of the Army Cadet Force, its first independent unit, which gave training along military lines for local boys.
Octavia Hill | Housing management
Of his considerable fortune, he paid for the Berry's Bridge to be built, and provided a gift of £60 in 1618 'to be lent to poor tradesmen', thus started a long tradition of charitable commissions within the village to support poor labouring men and widows, or bread and money to be distributed at Easter. In 1673, Thomas Adams left £100, half to be spent 'teaching poor children' and the other half to be used to distribute bread. Donations to education were a constant theme. In 1710, Margaret Tuckfield donated £30 towards providing 'Bibles and coats for poor children'.
Thorverton | Schools
Salisbury became prime minister of a minority administration from 1885 to 1886. In the November 1883 issue of "National Review" Salisbury wrote an article titled "Labourers' and Artisans' Dwellings" in which he argued that the poor conditions of working class housing were injurious to morality and health. Salisbury said ""Laissez-faire" is an admirable doctrine but it must be applied on both sides", as Parliament had enacted new building projects (such as the Thames Embankment) which had displaced working-class people and was responsible for "packing the people tighter": "...thousands of families have only a single room to dwell in, where they sleep and eat, multiply, and die… It is difficult to exaggerate the misery which such conditions of life must cause, or the impulse they must give to vice.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury | Prime Minister: 1885–1886
This title was also satirized by William Thackeray in Vanity Fair who talks of Lady Emily Hornblower and her tracts including "The washerwoman of Finchley Common." Yet the extent of the impact that they may have had on the lives of the working classes, at whom they were aimed, has also been questioned. They may have been: "a huge hit among the middle classes, who …had set up 'very respectable Societies' throughout the country, in order to distribute them."
Cheap Repository Tracts | Impact of the Cheap Repository Tracts
His work continued in 1857 when he founded a home for poor girls and in 1859, a complex for the poor. He also established a free college and in 1869, was assigned to revive the Manin Institute which served as a trade school for men. By 1881, he had taken over poor schools and revived them with staff and resources.
Luigi Caburlotto | Biography
Octavia Hill was born in Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, the daughter of James Hill, a corn merchant, former banker and follower of Robert Owen, and his third wife, Caroline Southwood Smith. He had been widowed twice, and had six children (five daughters and a son) from his previous marriages; Octavia was her father's eighth daughter and ninth child. He had been impressed by the writings on education of his future wife, the daughter of Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, a pioneer of sanitary reform. He had engaged Caroline as a governess to his children in 1832, and they were married in 1835.
Octavia Hill | Early years
Welch (2006) speculates that this segregation of housing was not Plumbe's intention; Plumbe himself was quoted in 1896 as saying that "I regret that it is necessary to separate the richer and more cultured classes from the poorer, owing to the prejudices which exist; and these prejudices exist on the part of the poor as well as on the part of the other class". Except for the corner houses, the houses were built in pairs, each sharing a porch with its neighbour. For many of the smaller fourth- and fifth-class houses, the doors were aligned at right angles to the façade of the house, so as not to open directly adjacently to their neighbours.
Noel Park | Design
Fifty years of subsidies had made the owners of arable land millionaires through mechanised cultivation and, with a crisis of over-production; the European Community was rewarding them for growing no crops on part of their land. However, opportunities for the homeless poor were fewer than ever in history. The grown-up children of local families can’t get on the housing ladder’. Ward's solution was that ‘there should be some place in every parish where it's possible for people to build their own homes, and they should be allowed to do it a bit at a time, starting in a simple way and improving the structure as they go along.
Colin Ward | Rural issues
He recognised the importance of education in alleviating poverty, and when Hannah More and her sister established Sunday schools for the poor in Somerset and the Mendips, he provided financial and moral support as they faced opposition from landowners and Anglican clergy. From the late 1780s onward, Wilberforce campaigned for limited parliamentary reform, such as the abolition of rotten boroughs and the redistribution of Commons seats to growing towns and cities, though by 1832, he feared that such measures went too far. With others, Wilberforce founded the world's first animal welfare organisation, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).
William Wilberforce | Political and social reform
Ruskin printed in "Fors" extracts from some of her letters dealing with the squalor of slum life in industrial cities and the devastation of the countryside caused by industrialisation. Atkinson's interest in the social conditions of the poor led Ruskin to introduce her by letter to Octavia Hill.
Blanche Atkinson | Life and works
Other pamphlets followed: "Lancashire Labour and the London Poor" (1871), "Impediments to the Circulation of Labour, with a Few Suggestions for their Removal" (1873), "The Unemployed in Great Cities, with Suggestions for the Better Organisation of Labourers" (1877), and "Vagrancy" in 1881. Hill was also a supporter of the role of women in public life, supporting campaigns to elect prominent women such as Maria Grey and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to the London School Board in 1870, recognising the potential benefits of education on relieving poverty.
Alsager Hay Hill | Social reform
As the population of Britain's cities grew, so too did the problem of housing the poor. Slum dwelling, the public health and public order issues that were associated with overcrowded and insanitary housing challenged the minds of philosophers, sociologists, charities, philanthropists, local government and national government for decades. Were the poor morally blameworthy for their own condition? Why were there slum dwellings? How were the poor to be housed and who had the responsibility for housing them? These were questions that went to heart of how the late Victorians and Edwardians understood the very nature of society. The proposed solutions evolved and illustrate that in studying the intellectual and social history of the period, it is difficult to establish a causal nexus between social thought and social action.
Matthew Hay | Matthew Hay's role in Aberdeen's Slum Clearance
Poverty is a prominent concern in "Oliver Twist". Throughout the novel, Dickens enlarged on this theme, describing slums so decrepit that whole rows of houses are on the point of ruin. In an early chapter, Oliver attends a pauper's funeral with Mr. Sowerberry and sees a whole family crowded together in one miserable room. This prevalent misery makes Oliver's encounters with charity and love more poignant. Oliver owes his life several times over to kindness both large and small. The apparent plague of poverty that Dickens describes also conveyed to his middle-class readers how much of the London population was stricken with poverty and disease.
Oliver Twist | Poverty and social class
About one-third of the population lived in poverty, with the wealthy expected to give alms to assist the impotent poor. Tudor law was harsh on the able-bodied poor, i.e., those unable to find work. Those who left their parishes in order to locate work were termed vagabonds and could be subjected to punishments, including whipping and putting at the stocks. The idea of the workhouse for the able-bodied poor was first suggested in 1576.
Elizabethan era | Poverty
The family remained poor in the new world, living in a tenement in a predominately Jewish area of the Lower East Side. Then, he worked on various short-term jobs in the New York city textile industry and as a picture frame maker in a factory. Morris later remembered his family as "frightfully poor," with his older brother and sisters working to help support the family. Hillquit felt himself compelled to get a job to help alleviate the family's difficult financial situation. Since his English was poor and his body frail, employment options were limited. He joined other young intellectual émigrés from Tsarist Russia as a shirt-maker, repetitiously stitching cuffs of garments.
Morris Hillquit | Early years
A perfect Debtor and Creditor account is kept between her and the Superintendent, for every day; and the state of that account, it is in her own power and nobody else's, to adjust to her advantage. Dickens located a home for the asylum originally named Urania Cottage in Shepherds Bush, Middlesex in 1847. He worked closely with Burdett-Coutts in the asylum founding and administration, regularly attending meetings and writing about the home in his journal, "All the Year Round". Opening to residents in November 1847, the institution provided food, shelter, and a detailed daily routine for the residents. Residents learned to read and write, worked in the garden, completed all household tasks including needlework, attended singing lessons, and cooked food for local poor relief.
Georgiana Morson | Urania Cottage
Lord Byron excoriated the state of St. Giles during a speech to the House of Lords in 1812, stating that "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country." At the heart of this area, now occupied by New Oxford Street and Centre Point, was "The Rookery", a particularly dense warren of houses along George Street and Church Lane, the latter of which in 1852 was reckoned to contain over 1,100 lodgers in overpacked, squalid buildings with open sewers.
19th-century London | Poverty
In 1906, he became a volunteer at Haileybury House, a charitable club for working-class boys in Stepney in the East End of London run by his old school, and from 1907 to 1909 he served as the club's manager. Until then, his political views had been more conservative. However, after his shock at the poverty and deprivation he saw while working with the slum children, he came to the view that private charity would never be sufficient to alleviate poverty and that only direct action and income redistribution by the state would have any serious effect. This sparked a process that caused him to convert to socialism.
Clement Attlee | Early career
At the heart of the Octavia Hill system was the weekly visit to collect rent. From the outset, Hill conceived this as a job for women only. She and her assistants (who included Emma Cons and Eva McLaren) combined the weekly rent collection with checking every detail of the premises and getting to know the tenants personally, acting as early social workers. At first Hill believed, "Voluntary workers are a necessity. They are better than paid workers, and can be had in sufficient numbers." Later, she found it expedient to maintain a paid workforce. Her system required a large staff.
Octavia Hill | Housing management
Poverty, the book argued, and neither maternal ignorance nor degeneration, caused ill health and high mortality. Had the children of Lambeth been 'well housed, well fed, well clothed and well tended from birth' who knows what they would have become. Fabian women were would-be lawmakers. The state must cast off its 'masculine' guise and 'co-parent'. The individual not the family should be the economic unit, and the state should pay family endowment, train midwives, make burial 'a free and honourable public service', introduce a legal minimum wage, and build clean, light, roomy buildings at economic rents for the working classes.
Maud Pember Reeves | "Round About a Pound a Week" (1913)
He had been refused permission to extend the factory onto what was at the time boggy farmland but planning permission was given for Frederick Moss to build 600 houses there. The houses were built in a hurry by unqualified labourers on muddy land, and this meant they were very poorly constructed. Tenants complained of unsanitary living conditions and commissioned an architect's report which upheld their grievances. On hearing of the problems tenants were facing Lazarus made his way to the tenant manager’s office, he spoke to the residents and a large crowd formed. Lazarus suggested they retire to the Pembroke Hall, where a committee was organised and a large campaign was launched.
Abraham Lazarus | Florence Park
Generous people have contributed, hands were put to work, and in a few time the first houses were built." After that, Pozzobon and a group of volunteers began to distribute clothes, food and educate the people of the Village of Charity to the work. They also planted fruit trees and flowers. Their objective was to help the poor to conquest dignity and self-respect. "I wanted so much to change this world so dominated by materialism. Bring Jesus, bring His message, and that all became good and loved each other. I felt a lot of strength and joy, and I put myself at the disposal of the Mother to accept all the sacrifices she sent me.
John Pozzobon | Commitment to the poorest
The CIH traces its organisational roots back to the philanthropic work carried out by pioneers such as Octavia Hill, in response to the revelation of the appalling housing conditions endured by much of the population in the 1884-1885 Royal Commission on the Housing of Working Classes. Hill established a method of letting properties on short-term tenancies and trained a group of women to manage the properties by collecting rents and dealing with repairs and tenants' welfare issues. The Association of Women Housing Workers, founded in 1916, carried on this pioneering work and housing advocate Irene Barclay was a leading figure in it.
Chartered Institute of Housing | History
My Parthenon is an allotment hut knocked together out of bits of rubbish. It is the richness of poor things that I am drawn to." As he told Peter Cheeseman, "everything I have ever drawn, every house, every man, every face has its roots in those few streets [of Smallthorne] All the things I have written, or hope to write, I am sure will have the same roots." The rare and wonderfully warm observations Berry made of working people are perhaps the most enduring: "old women, who sat night after night, squat as frogs, drinking, watching, eating and taking all in", "and the publican had got a clean collar and tie on, and all the world was ship-shape--this was happiness." "I once saw a pot-woman dance an impromptu fertility dance...the woman sitting with him had knees the size of hams, and drank a case of bottled beer as she sat there." And "then there are the princes of drink, men high in the hierarchy of booze, popes of the tap-room...they manage to live and live with style; to smoke and drink and back horses without ever seeming to concern themselves about money...savour the full richness of the working class who can live without work...I have known such men rear big families on the dole, and strut up the street with a rose in their buttonhole." Then there are the "ordinary men who cannot make ends meet and are under the rule of women...lesser men, who are pestered by women and children, whooping cough and rashes of one sort or another...troubles that reduce an honest man to a worrying machine...all the bellyaching and mither and half-pint scrimping that bogs most men down...the poverty, and the poverty of just being able to make ends meet...[for it is] bosses and women and children [who] pull men down from their dignity."
Arthur Berry (playwright) | Stoke-on-Trent life
Jeremy Bentham argued for a disciplinary, punitive approach to social problems, whilst the writings of Thomas Malthus focused attention on the problem of overpopulation, and the growth of illegitimacy. David Ricardo argued that there was an "iron law of wages". The effect of poor relief, in the view of the reformers, was to undermine the position of the "independent labourer".
Act for the Relief of the Poor 1601 | Criticism from leading intellectuals
The participants also did not experience the diseases such as cholera that afflicted people in the slums. The participants were kept "in character" during their entire stay. The crew did not eat in front of them, and knocked before entering their living quarters. When Mandy Holworth, the tailor's wife, found a hole in her shoe, she approached the crew and they asked her "What would a poor Victorian do?" instead of giving her a replacement set. Her family had two buckets of water - one for rinsing dishes and the other for rinsing their faces and armpits. She said that after the production, the dirt was so embedded under her toenails that it took two weeks to come clean.
Victorian Slum House | Production
Later, in 1931, in a letter to Samuel Hield Hamer, (Secretary of the National Trust, 1911–34) about his scheme for giving his property and musical instrument collection to the National Trust, Benton Fletcher wrote: "it embraces education, pleasure and philanthropy, &, would I feel confident have appealed strongly to the late Octavia Hill and her sisters whose efforts to encourage the love and performance of old music fostered the like desire in my own mind during the twelve years I lived in the slums of Southwark working with & for these farseeing pioneers."
Benton Fletcher | Octavia Hill, Cadets, Social work
Such methods included "owning or renting property above a certain value or paying parish rates, but also by completing a legal apprenticeship or a one-year service while unmarried, or by serving a public office" for that identical length of time.
Poor relief | End of the Elizabethan Era to 1750
Sidney Hill was prolific in works for the public benefit. He built and endowed the Queen Victoria Memorial Homes in Langford, to benefit those who could not afford to rent decent and safe accommodation. He built Wesleyan churches, Sunday schools, and ministers' houses in this country and in South Africa, and also furnished and endowed a mother's house for "Homes for Little Boys" at Swanley, Kent. His final act to benefit the poor was to build, furnish, and endow twelve Wesleyan cottage homes at Churchill.
Sidney Hill | Philanthropic works
In 1613, Sir Roger founded Wilbraham's Almshouses for six poor men at what was then the end of Welsh Row in Nantwich; they were the town's earliest almshouses. He also founded almshouses for two poor men in Acton in the same year. Additionally, he gave £4 to be distributed among the poor of Nantwich on Good Friday every year. He was also active in Monken Hadley, founding almshouses for "six decayed housekeepers" in 1616.
Roger Wilbraham | Charitable works
About the same time the town of Ramapo purchased the house for $1.3 million with help of a $496,000 grant from the New York State. There were also plans for contribution of furnishings and art from family heir Peter Varnum Poor, but thereafter, collections and restoration efforts barely moved or slid back through at least 2015.
Henry Varnum Poor House | Introduction
He was named Director of the society, whose London office stood in Blomfield Street, opposite the chapel which Fletcher founded.
Alexander Fletcher (minister) | Poverty and prison reform
He joined the south-eastern circuit, but soon devoted his energies to journalism and to literature, interesting himself especially in poor law and labour questions, and working as almoner to the Society for the Relief of Distress in the East of London. In letters to the press during 1868 Hill called attention to weaknesses in the poor laws, and urged a more scientific classification of paupers ("The Times", 9 January 1868). His pamphlet on "Our Unemployed," prepared for the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and published in 1867, was one of the first to call public attention to the problem of unemployment, and to suggest a national system of labour registration.
Alsager Hay Hill | Social reform
Cornelia Bradley-Martin's idea was to give a costume ball at so short notice that her guests would not have time to get their dresses from Paris, and instead support local businesses. This overlapped with the idea that it was much better for the laboring people if the wealthy spent their money locally instead of taking it to Europe. The Reverend Dr. Rainsford believed in the rich giving money to be distributed as charity, whereas others, including the members of the Musical Mutual Protective Union (MMPU), disagreed. They believed in the wealthy spending their wealth in enjoying themselves, and thus giving hundreds and thousands of working people an opportunity to earn money and maintain their self-respect instead of having to accept charity.
Bradley-Martin Ball | Concept
'The Miseries of the Poor are a National Sin, Shame, and Danger' was the title of a work (1717) in which he argued for the establishment of guardians of the poor and inspectors for the encouragement of arts and manufactures. Five years later he brought out 'Particular Answers to the most material Objections made to the Proposals for relieving the Poor.' The report of his trial was printed in 1684, and reprinted in 'Cobbett's State Trials,' ix. 1127–1228, and his impeachment of Bishop Burnet's 'History' is reprinted in the same volume of Cobbett, pp. 1229–1332.
Laurence Braddon | Writings
This would prevent the multiplication of many paupers." Ely’s anti-procreation solution did not abate in time. Two years later he wrote how poor children were "born and educated in the Almshouse for the devil" and that "the evil will extend, and the miserable will procreate children of misery" unless the genders were separated.". Ely's ideology regarding the poor was rooted in the concept of Divine Benevolence. This belief entailed that the problem of poverty was a fact of nature. Poverty, in this view, has always been a problem and always will be. The poverty-stricken were believed to be in their state, not due to external forces such as economics, war, or famine, but because they have made poor life choices, or are too insufficient as humans to be prosperous.
Ezra Stiles Ely | Ely & the Poor
Thus destroying "at one fell swoop" the maker, the buyer, the consumer – both the home and foreign markets will be lost – the agricultural and landed proprietor ruined:- all this they say will be the consequences if poor little English children are protected from the cruelty and oppression of their worse than Egyptian task-masters. Happy England, whose very existence depends upon thy cruelty to infants! ... Self interest and avarice, and "not necessity" now goad thee on to ruin. England, beware! Let her inhabitants consider. They pretend to be Christians, and their God hath said – "If thou seest the oppression of the poor and violent perverting of judgement and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they." "But it shall not be well with the wicked, neither shall he prolong his days." "Rob not the poor because he is poor, for the Lord will plead their cause and spoil the soul of those who spoil them" "Deliver the poor and needy, rid them out of the hand of the wicked." "If the poor curse thee in the bitterness of his soul, his prayer shall be heard of him that made him."" "A prayer out of a poor man's mouth reacheth to the ears of God, and his reproach cometh speedily." "He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his maker."" From this time forward, Oastler used the "Intelligencer" as the chief outlet for his letters.
Richard Oastler | Halifax resolutions – breach with the "Mercury"
Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named "Urania Cottage", in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush, which he managed for ten years, setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.
Charles Dickens | Philanthropy
Something must be done for the poor creatures. We wish it generally known that we sympathize with every effort to relieve the suffering of the women of India.”The Queen then summoned Hariot Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, more commonly known as Lady Dufferin, the Vicerine of India, to Windsor Castle and tasked her with improving healthcare and education for the women of India. In 1885, Lady Dufferin set up the Countess of Dufferin Fund which provided scholarships for women to be educated as doctors, hospital assistants, nurses, and midwives. It also financed the construction of female hospitals, dispensaries, and female only wards in preexisting hospitals.
Elizabeth Bielby | Introduction
The Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom designed by Richard Cross, Home Secretary during Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's second Conservative Government, which involved allowing local councils to buy up areas of slum dwellings in order to clear and then rebuild them. It formed part of Disraeli's social reform initiative aimed at the "elevation of the people" (the working class), a policy stated in his 1872 speeches at Manchester and Crystal Palace, and associated with his doctrine of One Nation Conservatism. Also, key individuals, such as the philanthropist Octavia Hill, helped pressurise the government into passing the Act.
Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 | Introduction
He was the first American to make a sustained argument that milk was the perfect food. By the early 1850s, the AICP was the most influential charity in New York, and its program was soon imitated in many other American cities. The association stressed character building as a way to end poverty, and took steps to insure that only the "deserving" poor received charity: idlers, malingerers and vagrants were to be sent to workhouses to do hard labor, while the depraved and debased were to be locked up in penitentiaries was a warning to others not to follow their path.
Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor | History
Both Olive and Anne were actively involved in women's issues; in 1910, Olive was an honorary secretary of the West Riding Ladies' Club and in 1938, Anne organised an exhibition at the London Housing Centre for the centenary of Octavia Hill's birth which was visited at Anne's own request by Queen Mary. Anne purchased a Georgian house and donated it to Lady Margaret School which Enid had established in 1917. Enid and Anne collaborated to publish works concerning the suffragette cause.
Charles Frederic Moberly Bell | Marriage, daughter, biography
The Disraeli government's programme of social reform began in the second session of parliament, 1874–75. This government, chiefly under the influence of the Home Secretary Richard Cross and with the encouragement of Disraeli, addressed "the condition of the people" through major reforms in three areas: housing, savings and labour relations. Disraeli's watchword was ""Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas"", which the Liberals decried as "a policy of sewage". Disraeli responded that sanitary reform included "most of the civilising influences of humanity". The housing of the working classes was dealt with by the Artisan's and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 which for the first time gave local councils in large towns power to destroy slum buildings for sanitary reasons and replace them with new ones for artisans.
Premierships of Benjamin Disraeli | Social reform
Kimmins had taken her motto from Juliana Horatia Ewing's 1885 novel "The Story of a Short Life". She started the Guild of the Poor Brave Things to help children with disabilities in London. Vachell (like Kimmins) took her motto ‘Laetus sorte mea’ (‘Happy in my lot’) from Ewing's book. In 1913 Vachell's charity built what is now called the Guild Heritage Building in Bragg's Lane in Bristol. At the time it was called "The Guild of the Brave Poor Things". This red brick building was innovative as it featured ramps and wide doorways to ensure that it was accessible to people with disabilities.
Ada Vachell | Life
Ely serves as an example of how early nineteenth century American Christian ministers viewed the problem of urban poverty. Ely, through his work in the New York Almshouse (1811, 1813), was credited as being "one of the first in America to face openly the problem of prostitution and to deal sympathetically with its victims." His sympathy for the poor he served, however, was reflected in lines such as: asking if it would be lawful "to confine in work-houses some of the clamorous and diseased persons, who are a nuisance to the city?" He also called for the banning of the procreation of the poor by separating families in the Almshouse: "No sort of connexion ["sic"] should exist between men, women, and children.
Ezra Stiles Ely | Ely & the Poor
He reasoned that poor relief acted against the longer-term interests of the poor by raising the price of commodities and undermining the independence and resilience of the peasant. In other words, the poor laws tended to "create the poor which they maintain." It offended Malthus that critics claimed he lacked a caring attitude toward the situation of the poor. In the 1798 edition his concern for the poor shows in passages such as the following:
An Essay on the Principle of Population | Proposed solutions
This is an important concept to consider as events such as the War of 1812, trade embargoes, and numerous market fluctuations during the era had severe, and negative consequences, on the problem of poverty. Divine Benevolence held that Christians that were better off serving the poor with compassion and direction towards more godly living and away from the dangers of vice. Direct assistance, in the form of food, clothing, or fuel for fire, was viewed as an enabling agent, and was therefore discouraged. Although Ely described his written work about the poor as: “My journal is of necessity the record of wretchedness,” he nevertheless maintained a positive outlook regarding his ministerial role.
Ezra Stiles Ely | Ely & the Poor
James Edward Oglethorpe (22 December 1696 – 30 June 1785) was a British soldier, Member of Parliament, and philanthropist, as well as the founder of the colony of Georgia. As a social reformer, he hoped to resettle Britain's worthy poor in the New World, initially focusing on those in debtors' prisons. Born to a prominent British family, Othethorpe left college in England and a British Army commission to travel to France, where he attended a military academy before fighting under Prince Eugene of Savoy in the Austro-Turkish War. He returned to England in 1718, and was elected to the House of Commons in 1722.
James Oglethorpe | Introduction
In 1908, Casson was a working as housing manager for the social reformer, Octavia Hill, taking care of the living conditions of residents at Red Cross Hall in Southwark. For the next five years she organised recreational activities at the hall, focusing on the arts. Octavia Hill's philosophy influenced Casson's work over the following years. In 1911, Casson's uncle, Isambard Owen, vice-chancellor at University of Bristol, promised her a place studying medicine if she could be formally matriculated to the university. She struggled with her Latin exams for two years, but eventually passed them and registered to study medicine on 1 October 1913 at the age of 32.
Elizabeth Casson | Biography
The Act was criticised by Lord Wemyss and his Liberty and Property Defence League as "class legislation" and Wemyss asked whether the government would now house the police and Foreign Office clerks. He further claimed that the Act would be "strangling the spirit of independence and the self-reliance of the people, and destroying the moral fibre of our race in the anaconda coils of state socialism". Salisbury responded: "Do not imagine that by merely affixing to it the reproach of Socialism you can seriously affect the progress of any great legislative movement, or destroy those high arguments which are derived from the noblest principles of philanthropy and religion".
Housing of the Working Classes Act 1885 | Criticism
It was not until the election came around and they realised that Franco's accession would be a severe blow to England. Thus they realised that Fascism is bad for England due to its revolutionary origins or heavily military-dependent system of policing and control. Orwell himself, however, admits that Fascism is a better system for the wealthy, unless you were a Jew, than Communism or democratic socialism.
England Your England | Introduction
But Wollstonecraft's criticisms of the wealthy do not necessarily reflect a concomitant sympathy for the poor. For her, the poor are fortunate because they will never be trapped by the snares of wealth: "Happy is it when people have the cares of life to struggle with; for these struggles prevent their becoming a prey to enervating vices, merely from idleness!" Moreover, she contends that charity has only negative consequences because, as Jones puts it, she "sees it as sustaining an unequal society while giving the appearance of virtue to the rich". In her national plan for education, she retains class distinctions (with an exception for the intelligent), suggesting that: "After the age of nine, girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to be removed to other schools, and receive instruction, in some measure appropriated to the destination of each individual .
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | Class
In the 17th century the rural poor lived in earth houses, while a number of significant buildings were established nearby.
Felindre Farchog | History
Politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn (Lab) and James Brokenshire (Con) have condemned Henley. The day after the story broke, Henley Homes issued a statement saying it had been a misunderstanding; all children were welcome to use the communal area including those from the social housing in Wren Mews.
Poor door | Lambeth
If the widest group she championed in this way were the poor in Victorian England, she also spoke out for the rights of women. She was wedded to her faith, a moderate Anglicanism that rejected as excessive the attitudes of Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement: she wrote "We have abundance of technical terms but have we the spirit of the Gospel?"
Caroline Cornwallis | Introduction
“I have always held that poverty and pain, disease and health are evils of greatly less importance than they appear except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character; and that true philanthropy aims at increasing strength more than at the correct and immediate relief of poverty…” "The working-women of England are indeed in a very sorry plight, and that if knights-errant were still to the fore they would find work enough for lance and sword in freeing their sisters from the tyranny by which they are oppressed"
Helen Bosanquet | Quotes
With this growth of prosperity also came a tide of poverty, and this was to prove the mission for the Victorian era. A hundred years before, the ethos had been one of almost Puritan self-reliance, but now the Dickensian poverty, evident in cholera epidemics and rampant malnutrition, made social responsibility an urgent necessity. The minister who guided the first 25 years of this (1839–64) was Thomas Cromwell, FSA (1792–1870). (Like many Anglican vicars, one of his hobbies was local history.) In 1840, a Sunday school was set up for poor children, and soon thereafter a Domestic Mission Society, to visit the poor in their homes.
Newington Green | 19th century
He also helped design a house for the poor and jail.
Carlo Giuseppe Merlo | Introduction