You will be glad to hear that Dr. —— has reported to the Board of Works as to districts requiring to be dealt with under the Art. Dwell. Bill, and has not included B——’s Court. I think he has chosen the right spots, and am glad, tho’ I was prepared for the other course being adopted. How glad one is if anyone one has suspected does better than one has hoped!
The next letter refers to the Bunhill Fields burial ground.
Thanks for the letter to Mr. Harrison. I hope to make way in the matter; but it is a little difficult to know how to begin. However Mr. Bond and I are to see the ground on Wednesday; and, on Saturday, Mr. Lefevre, now Chairman of the Commons Preservation Society, the Secretary and the Solicitor are to meet Mr. Bond and me; and then I presume we shall make a formal application to the “Six Weeks’” Meeting. I long to get the ground; but though the Local Board will surrender immediately their seventeen years’ lease, so far as I at present see, there is no chance of the Quakers doing anything, except selling at full value. We may manage the cost; but it points to securing churchyards if possible, which would only entail the cost, very heavy I imagine, of making them beautiful, not the purchase also. However we shall see: at any rate, it is a definite bit of ground in a popular poor neighbourhood to be sold; and the thing is to learn the price, to see whether we can raise it; and if so, whether it is the best expenditure for the money. Perhaps, if the Six Weeks’ Meeting can do nothing in the way of generosity, the application may interest individual members to give. At any rate we must see. I am full of thought about it all. I wonder if you see the Charity Organisation Reporter, and noticed the appointment of Mr. Loch as secretary. Did I tell you that he is engaged to Miss Peters, and so good? I daresay Miranda has told you of Miss Potter,[78] who has been staying here. She wants to stay on for, possibly, two or three years. She is very bright and happy here; extremely capable, and has been through a good deal in her life, though she is young. She seems to fit in among us very well.
By the way, dost thou know I have found a motto in George Herbert which I intend to appropriate, as expressive of the way that I get on now, by means of my friends? “A dwarf, on a giant’s shoulder, sees further of the two.”
We have chosen a pretty one for the Girls’ Institute in B. Court—“God hath oft a great share in a little house.”
... I do love life and all it brings very deeply, and should like to live long too, to see the progress of so many things that I care for; I think a past is as great a help to a life as to an institution. It seems as if one were bound to live up to it. What I always fear about my own life is the tendency to excuse myself from small daily duties; yet I am certain they are the real test of life. I don’t mean that great claims ought to be sacrificed to small ones, nor that the duties remain the same for a woman as for a girl. Many small manual duties pass wholly away; but it is by the small graciousnesses, by the thoroughness of the out-of-sight detail, that God will judge our spirit and our work. My difficulty is always to secure this exquisite thoroughness, which alone seems to make the work true, and yet to delegate it. However, I learn gradually how to overlook and test it better and better; and I gather round me an ever larger, more capable, and more sweetly attached body of fellow-workers.
As to the gracious thoughtfulness for others, and silent self-control and sweet temper, I never had much gift for them; and I do fear that, deeply as I honour them, and hard as I strive to live up to my ideal, I still fail very decidedly,—which is wrong. I used to think that time would soften passionate engrossment, and leave me leisure to perceive the little wants of others; but I think I pant with almost increasing passionate longing for the great things that I see before me.
We are getting on about the open spaces gradually, and, I think, surely; but there is no need to trouble anyone yet, till those we have in view are more definitely arranged about. It is a great joy to me that something will be done. Will you be interested I wonder, in the enclosed letter? My sister[79] wrote it for our pupils, past and present; but I was so delighted with it, that I took possession of it, and printed it for private circulation. Though it is only a week old, it is meeting with the warmest response, so that I fancy we shall have to let it become something larger and more public. I want our Clubs, Institutes, school-rooms, when we have our parties there, and the outsides of our churches and houses, to be brighter.
What time, I wonder, will it take, before we fairly encounter the opposite tide, wave to wave—you with your steady gain—the Enemy with his steadier and swifter ruin? When is the limit to be put to the destruction of fields?[80]
Miranda Hill.
From a Photograph by Maull and Fox.
My question, a very vital one, is, whether it really never enters your mind at all that all measures of amelioration in great cities, such as your sister’s paper pleads for, and as you rejoice in having effected, may in reality be only encouragements to the great Evil Doers in their daily accumulating Sin?
I have received to-day your letter, with its beautifully felt and written statement. It comes to me on my birthday to the Nuova Vita; this day last year being the one on which I got signs sufficient for me that there was hope of that life; and I am very thankful to know that I have been thus of use to you, and that you feel that I have; a much mistaken sense of a separation between us in essential principles having been for two or three years growing upon me, to my great puzzlement and pain; so that this paper is a very moving and precious revelation to me.
I was greatly delighted by your long kind letter; and it is much more than a delight to me, and it is a most weighty assistance in my purposes, that you can take this house[81] and put it to use....
I wanted to say something more about your and Miranda’s work.[82] I cannot say more, however, than that, whether in the best direction or not, it cannot but be exemplary and fruitful.
Miss Cons has taken supervision of the Drury Lane district from her own house, Mr. Westroper being wholly, and her sister partly, told off to her, and several volunteers; if it works well, it will be grand. The Bishop’s meeting doesn’t bear fruit in the distinct way that I had hoped; the visitors won’t organise before they come, but come singly, which means that much more indirect work will have to be done before we get our organisation. However all the result is good, as far as it goes.
Miranda’s paper[83] was so very beautiful. I do wish it had been heard by a larger audience. The room was quite full, however; and the hearers were just those in whom the thoughts would be likely to bear abundant fruit.
I am writing to ask you whether you will do me a service, which will really be a considerable one. It is to take the chair for me at a meeting of the Liberal Social Union on the 29th of this month, when I am going to read a paper on the subject of Charity. The people are all strangers to me; and I gather that their spirit is not one with which I shall feel very heartily in tune. It is a large gathering, and may be difficult to keep to the consideration of what we can do, instead of what we can not do. I am extremely anxious about this latter point. It is so easy to denounce what has been done, so difficult patiently to consider what can be done; and I don’t want the opportunity to be lost of doing this. It will depend more on the tone of the meeting than anything. Personally, too, it would be a comfort to feel in sympathy with the chairman, and full confidence in him, which I certainly should do very completely if you would kindly fill the office. The chairmen suggested by no means seemed to me satisfactory; and I was delighted that the letters, which named them, contained also the proposal that I should select one. I looked all down the list of members; and there is not a single one whom I know, except yourself, whom I should like for the post. I feel the moment an important one. Unless we get volunteers in greater abundance, and that very rapidly, the Charity Organisation Society must suffer very considerably from the necessarily hard routine of official work compared to spontaneous work; and I am trying to do what in me lies to secure the help of as many people as possible. Among the members of the L.S.U. I believe we should find the wisdom, and freedom from parochial work; and, if we could but stir up their living sympathy with the poor, we might do much.
I sent you a little brooch, which I want you to wear in remembrance of the day you were baptised, and of the words which we then heard together. Ask Mama for a piece of her hair to put in the brooch; and, when you wear it, think of her love. It is a funny little old-fashioned brooch, but I thought it was very pretty; and I liked it, because it looked as if it had a history. I thought you might like it for this reason too. But I am afraid it will not begin to speak to you, like those delightful things in Andersen’s stories. If only it could, what a quantity it might tell you! I wonder whom it belonged to; and whether it has been given, with words of loving hope, ever before, to any one; and whether the hope was realised or not. Does it not look as if its pearls might once have been tears, but had lost their passionateness, and had become quiet, like old people’s tears, that are slow and still and deep, and much sadder, often, than young people’s, though more beautiful in power of reflecting? What do the old people’s tears reflect when they have lived good lives? Oh, Ollie dear, they reflect all the things which are round them, or have happened to them; and each looks lovelier than the other; some rose-coloured, some gold, some blue like the heaven, some white like snow. We may all be glad to have tears like these, set like jewels in a crown, to make our lives look royal.
This old-fashioned brooch, too, seemed to me like a good christening present, because those words that we heard have a history, like it;—those words, I mean, about your being signed with the sign of the Cross, in token that hereafter you should not be ashamed to be Christ’s soldier and to fight under His banner against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Many a mother, Ollie, like yours, has heard them prayed over her little girl, and has wondered whether, when she grew to be a woman, she would remember them. Many a father has listened to them, asking for strength to bring up his child, so that she shall live as she ought. Many loving friends have stood by and prayed for the child, for her own sake, for the sake of the parents who love her, and for the sake of the great God who loves her even more. And the little girl has grown up, and lived her life, and had her history. And the same beautiful old words have been prayed for others; and, whether they have remembered them, and lived as if they were true, or whether they have fallen away, still the memory of the words has always borne witness to those who loved the children, that they really did belong to God, and that they had no business to be mean or cowardly or untruthful or anything bad. If the children forgot all this, and did wrong, still there was hope that they would return and be good some day; for that they were under God’s own care, and that He wanted to gather them under His wings.
We, who were all together that day, asked for you, my child, that you might have courage to do right. We know God means that courage for you, that He will give it to you. Remember this all your life long; and remember too, the love which gathered round you as a child.
I send you a few words, more precious than any pearls; for they contain the wish of a great and good man for his little girl. They are very much like what we might have said to you; only that they are set in a sweet, solemn, and lovely way, which will make you remember them better.
Take them, dear, as the expression of what all who love you would say; and let them ring in your ears in the coming years. I, your loving godmother, Octavia Hill, write them on the next page for you.
The lines appended are Kingsley’s poem beginning:—
Our failure this year has been on the open space question. Dora will tell thee about the Friends. Not that they stand alone; the matter is one on which much preliminary work has to be done. People don’t know about the importance yet. It is so sad; for the places are going for ever so rapidly. I have written, by Mr. Lefevre’s request, to The Times.
Bunhill Fields contract for sale has fallen through, and the Quakers are again considering the matter. I hear hopeful news about Lincoln’s Inn.[84]
B——’s Court is going so beautifully; every room and shop let; the people so happy and good; the clubs full of life; the finances so satisfactory.
... The fact is my time is so utterly engrossed that it is absolutely true that I have not time to see even old friends quietly, unless under special circumstances warranting an exception. It is strange, but the strain of responsible schemes under my continuous charge, the thought necessary for dealing with all the new large plans before me, and starting them wisely and well, the ever-flowing stream of persons with whom I have to make appointments on business, and the incessant buzz around me of my assistants and immediate fellow-workers, leave me in a state of utter exhaustion on a Saturday night, which makes perfect stillness the only possibility for Sundays. Even the walks are often taken up by the companionship of persons who want to talk over with me this plan or that; or to submit to me some difficulty. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to see anything even of Mama and Miranda, and as to Gertrude and Minnie I rarely see them, even if they come here. It is well for me that in the course of work I do naturally see many of my friends; and that I do love and care very deeply for many of my fellow workers. Else I don’t quite know what would have happened to me by now.
I know you will begin to tell me I ought to give something up. And I could only answer my whole life is giving up of work. I part with bit after bit often of that I care for most, and that week after week; but it is the nearest of all duties, added to the large new questions, in which a little of my time goes a very long way, which thus engross me. Such, for instance, as those I have now in hand—the purchase for Lord Pembroke of £6,000 worth of houses for the poor. He gives money, pays worker; one of my fellow workers trains her. Mr. Barnett sends me names of courts; but the seeing the spot, its capabilities, value, the best scheme to improve it, getting surveyors’ and lawyers’ reports, I must do. I have six such schemes in hand now, small and large together at this moment. Then I had to see Sir James Hogg, the chairman of the Metrop. Bd. of Works, on Tuesday about the Holborn rebuilding under the Art. Dwell. Bill. I have obtained leave from Sir E. Colbroke to plant the Mile End Road with trees. I have all the negotiations with the vestry to make. The C.O.S. takes much of my time, tho’ I have left all our local works to others. Then all the time I have 3,500 tenants and £30,000 or £40,000 worth of money under my continuous charge; and, though I only see my people in one court face to face as of old, and the ordinary work goes on smoothly, yet even the extraordinary on so large a scale takes time. Questions of rebuilding, of construction, of changes of collectors, of introduction of workers to one another,—I assure you the exceptional things I can hardly refuse to do (so large is the result from half an hour’s work), use up my half hours nearly every one. I do read, I must, in holidays, when I go right away out of reach of frequent posts daily on those blessed Sundays, sometimes the last thing at night, that I may sleep better. I now and again catch (as if for breath) at a picture gallery; but so rarely, and only suddenly, when I see I can.
I have your beautiful letter with account of donations in print, and am greatly delighted with it. You will find yourself, without working for it, taking a position in the literary, no less than in the philanthropic, world. It seems to me not improbable that the great powers and interests you are now exciting in so many minds, will indeed go on from the remedial to the radical cure of social evils: and that you have been taking the right method of attack all along....
Did you know Mrs. Nassau Senior?... I sit waiting for the telegram that shall tell me that she is gone from among us. I feel stunned; for I had large hope from her vigorous constitution; and now this relapse is strange. She was, among my many friends, one of the noblest, purest-hearted, bravest to accept, for herself and all she loved, pain, if pain meant choice of highest good; with an ardent longing to serve, a burning generosity, which put us all to shame. Moreover she loved me, as few do; and I her; and, when I think that I can go to her no more, I dare not think of what the loss will be. But neither dare I grieve; she seems too high, too near, too great, to grieve for or about; the silence will be terrible, but if one keeps one’s spirit true and quiet, and in tune with the noblest part of the absent loved ones, strange voices come across the silence, convictions of how they feel, and what they would say, if they could, to our listening hearts; only I know this and all things come straight to us from One Who cares for us; that His truth, somehow, the fact He has allowed to be, is best; and it is a help so to have loved Truth thro’ all one’s life, that, when she veils herself in darkest guise, we dare not turn from her....
I am busy about Quaker’s Burial Ground, and Archbishop’s meeting and other things.
I have replied to Mr. L. and Fawcett pretty much in full ... and reiterate my own strong conviction that the railway is not needed, that it will spoil the Heath’s beauty and need not increase accessibility; compare the erection of a station to any which might be erected in Kensington Gardens on the same plea; state my own opinions strongly, and “let it work.” You will judge whether to do more. I am doing my little best—which means many fruitless letters about Bunhill Fields, the Archbishop’s meeting, ... and my poor Lambeth. It is unfruitful work so far; but all things must have a season of sowing, and the reaping must come some day. Numbers of people, too, are doing their best to help, which is beautiful.... I have, you see, so very much of many kinds in my life.
A letter on the opening of B. Court Club on Sunday.
I think, as I live so very near, and as my life is so much in my own hands to plan, so that I can (and I will) rest on other days, that I will, if I am better and return, take up some small bit of work on a Sunday, afternoon, down there, or perhaps get the girls to come to me in the evening. My life seems meant for this, if for anything; only the worst is that I seem not to have that glad bright sympathy with young things, which makes some of my friends able to make such classes a real joy to the girls. However, I will try—or try to try.
... I rather thought of “St. Christopher’s Buildings” if the name must be changed. I’m very fond of St. Christopher. His early history, less known than the later parts, is to me very beautiful; and, associated in my mind with B. Crt., the way he learnt that the good thing was the strong thing, seems to me very grand. And he learnt it by service and bearing too. The world would fancy it was named after some old church; and I should hear the grand old legend in the name. Is it too fantastic a name? Do you know the early part of St. Christopher’s life, I wonder? I think in B. Crt. we want all to be reminded that the devil is himself afraid when he really sees the good thing. Also I like St. Christopher’s respect for his own physical strength.... Everyone is so kind. I think I have a magnificent set of friends. As to Mrs. Shaen and Lady Ducie they really are like angels. I hardly knew Mrs. Shaen’s height of nature till now, and her expressiveness makes her a great delight; while Lady Ducie’s magnificent silent sympathy, and that exquisite depth of tenderness of hers, are so very beautiful. The servants too, and the children, and the people who come in and out to help, and are not very near,—their silent little acts of thoughtful kindness touch me often very much. I ought to be so very full of thankfulness and joy.
I cannot tell you what important work we have in hand. We are restoring and re-establishing a provident dispensary here. It implies an immense deal of thought, judgment, money. Mr. Crowder is quite the leader in it all. I am quite proud of him.... Then we were laying deep foundations for Mr. Hughes’ future success.[85] This week we have our blind concert at which 660 tenants also will be present.
I went over the new buildings in B. Court on Wednesday. They really are beautiful. It does one’s heart good to see them. I think Lord Ducie must be delighted.
Everyone falls in with my plan for the little orphans,[86] and I am trying to place them in the village where Miss Harris lives. Boarding out is most successfully carried on there. Dear Janey came and stayed there and saw the houses. My former pupils would watch the children for me, and, if I go there, I should see them myself.
Octa arrived safely yesterday in perfect enthusiasm about her visit and certainly better for it. She dined in the evening at Lord Monteagle’s, and found Fawcett quite opposed to the Bill. She talked with him at dinner and afterwards, and I believe quite altered his views. In wishing her good-bye he said he owed to her a most interesting and delightful evening, and he was glad to have met her. He apologised to Lady Monteagle for having engrossed the conversation, and kept it on this topic; he hoped to meet her again, and not be so absorbed.
A change has come o’er the spirit of our dream. Octa has seen Dr. Hughlings Jackson three times; and Lady Ducie has seen him once; and he insists, in a way we cannot gainsay, that Octa shall at once cease work. She is going abroad, but we don’t yet know where—and is organising work in the houses to go on without her;—all the other work must of course take its chance in other hands,—those in which it now is.
Dr. H. Jackson thinks she will ultimately quite recover, and says she must have immense strength to have gone on all these months.
Believe me the work you have done for me in B. Court during the past year has been the greatest consolation to me. It often sits heavily on my heart to think how much real deep personal work goes undone in the courts, while I am called away, or which I am not fitted to do; and, when I see that you and such as you are taking it up, I feel so thankful. I know that that is the work which is of deep and true value.