Good housing that pays /

by Fullerton L. Waldo

When Octavia was thirteen, her mother removed to London to become manager of a Guild for the employment of women. One of the workers at the Guild lent Octavia books and pamphlets on the life of the poor, which so greatly depressed her that “she began to think that all laughter or amusement was wicked.”

But she was cured of that delusion when she was given an active part in the work of the Guild, and found how necessary fun and frolic are to relieve the monotony of working lives.

The little Octavia was put in charge of a work-room in which girls of about her own age made toys. Since she was poor herself, she realized to the full their lives of drudgery and hardship, and she did all she could to make them happy. Some years later she wrote of this period: “We were so very, very poor, and home was like a little raft in a dark storm, where the wonder every day was whether we could live through it; and now the sea looks calm, even if there are waves; and we have leisure to look at the little boat in which we sail. I wonder if it will ever be painted with high colors.”

It was at about this time that Octavia asked Ruskin to teach her drawing; and his assent brought a new and a constraining influence to bear on all her life. “I would give years,” she wrote after the meeting, “if I could bring to Ruskin ‘the peace which passeth all understanding.’” Ruskin told her she was “far more accurate” than any of his college pupils. No wonder Ruskin, the artist and ameliorist at once, found her an apt pupil, taking fire from the gleam of his own restless inspiration.

An address by Kingsley, delivered before an association of women created to promote sanitary reform, helped Octavia, at twenty, to visualize her objective. Kingsley adverted to the fact that small houses were passing more and more into the possession of individuals, and declared that legislation must recognize the fact. “He was not going into the question here; it would have to be attended to, but it seemed a great way off. Therefore he hoped women would go, not only to the occupiers, but to the possessors of the house, and influence people of ‘our own class.’”

In this, her summary of the speaker’s somewhat vague and not over-optimistic conclusions with regard to the possibility of legislative action, Octavia seems to be feeling a challenge to the deepest in her nature, and to a maturing if not a finally fixed conviction.

At the end of 1860, just after Octavia’s twenty-second birthday, came an event of moment—one of the great crises in her life, her biographer styles it—in the removal to 14 Nottingham Place. She arranged to have poor women come to the house weekly to sew. One night a woman fainted, and Miss Hill’s sympathetic inquiry elicited the fact that she had not slept the previous night; she had been washing clothes and rocking the baby’s cradle at the same time with her foot.

Miss Hill called at the poor woman’s home next day, and found that it was a damp, unsanitary kitchen.

She then tried to find other and better quarters, but there was no place where they would take the children. She was given in her quest to realize that at her very door there were squalid, teeming homes like those from which the little toy-workers came; and she brooded upon the sorrowful fact.

Under the cloud she came to Ruskin to bring him some of her drawings. She found him in a pessimistic frame of mind.