author
Eleanor C. Hill Smyth
1831–1926
A late-Victorian biographer with a personal link to one of Britain’s great reform stories, she wrote with the warmth of family memory and the patience of a careful researcher. Her best-known book revisits the life and work of postal pioneer Sir Rowland Hill.
1 Audiobook
Sir Rowland Hill: The Story of a Great Reform
by Eleanor C. Hill Smyth
About the author
Born in 1831 and living until 1926, Eleanor C. Hill Smyth is chiefly remembered for Sir Rowland Hill; The Story of a Great Reform (1907). The book was presented as the work of Rowland Hill’s daughter and, in its dedication, she described herself as his "last remaining immediate descendant," giving the biography an unusually intimate perspective on the family behind penny postage.
Her writing centers on historical biography rather than fiction, and surviving catalog and bookseller records also associate her with a work on Thomas Gray. What stands out most is her effort to preserve the memory of Rowland Hill not just as a public reformer, but as a person whose ideas changed everyday life by making communication cheaper and more accessible.
Because so little widely available biographical material about her survives online, the outline of her own life is much fainter than the life she recorded in print. Even so, her work remains of interest to readers drawn to nineteenth-century reform, postal history, and biographies written from within a family circle.