HILL, Sir ROWLAND (1795–1879), the inventor of penny postage, third son of Thomas Wright Hill, by Sarah Lea his wife, was born at Kidderminster on 3 Dec. 1795. [For his ancestry and father's career see Hill, Thomas Wright.] About 1803 he entered his father's school at Hill Top, then on the outskirts of Birmingham, but being of delicate constitution he was often hindered in his studies by illness. Defective though his father was as a schoolmaster, he was admirable as a father. From him his son derived his fearless originality and largeness of view. It was his mother who gave him his perseverance and his caution. She imparted her pecuniary troubles, from which his family was never free, to her son even when he was a child. ‘I early saw,’ he said, ‘the terrible inconvenience of being poor.’ ‘From a very early age,’ wrote one of his brothers, ‘he felt responsibility in a way none of us did.’ He helped in the household work. ‘By this means I acquired,’ he said, ‘a feeling of responsibility and habits of business, dispatch, punctuality, and independence, which have proved invaluable to me through life.’ He had a strong taste for mechanical work, and became expert in the use of tools. Miss Edgeworth's stories had, he said, a great influence on his character, and inspired him with an ardent wish to do something for the world by which his name should be remembered. At the age of twelve he ceased to be a pupil and became a teacher, but his education was still carried on by his love of knowledge and his daily intercourse with his father. He was his assistant in a course of public lectures on natural philosophy. He made himself many ingenious machines. He learnt mathematics by teaching others, and became a good astronomer and an expert trigonometrical land-surveyor. In mental arithmetic he was wonderfully skilful, and he trained his pupils till they could rival ‘the Calculating Boy.’ His knowledge and ignorance were strangely mixed. The extent of his deficiencies he first learnt from Dr. John Johnstone, the editor of Dr. Parr's ‘Works,’ and he endangered his health in trying to remedy them. He made curious experiments in diet, living for many periods of three days each on not more than two articles, such as boiled green pease and salt, damson-pie and sugar. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he had undertaken the entire management of his father's money affairs, and at last cleared off all the debts. ‘It was,’ he recorded in his journal, ‘the height of my ambition to establish a school for the upper and middle classes wherein the science and practice of education might be improved to such a degree as to show that it is now in its infancy.’ He built a new school-house, to which the name of Hazelwood was given. He was his own architect and his own clerk of the works. For two or three weeks in succession he worked eighteen hours a day, with seven days to the week. He set about organising the discipline of the school. He established a system of rigid punctuality. He elaborated a curious system of government by the boys, with a constitution and a code of laws that filled more than a hundred closely printed pages. Corporal punishment was abolished. The laws were sanctioned by penalties which were strictly enforced. Bad marks could be cleared off by any kind of useful work done in play hours. A court of justice was established, with boys for magistrate, jury, and constables. A committee of boys was chosen who made laws and helped to govern the school. The whole system would have seemed impossible in Utopia, yet it succeeded in Birmingham. W. L. Sargant, in his ‘Essays by a Birmingham Manufacturer’ (ii. 187), thus describes the working of this strange system: ‘By juries and committees, by marks and by appeals to a sense of honour discipline was maintained. But this was done at too great a sacrifice. The thoughtlessness, the spring, the elation of childhood were taken from us; we were premature men.’ Six years before Dr. Arnold went to Rugby ‘the Hazelwood System’ was exciting a lively public interest. It can scarcely be doubted that it had an influence on his mind.
Rowland Hill's eldest brother, Matthew Davenport Hill [q. v.], described this system in 1822 in a volume entitled ‘Public Education: Plans for the Government and Liberal Instruction of Boys in Large Numbers, drawn from Experience.’ The book was reviewed in the ‘London Magazine’ in April and May 1824 by De Quincey, and in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ for January 1825 by Basil Hall. The school almost at one bound sprang into fame. Jeremy Bentham inspected it, and ‘threw aside,’ as he wrote to Dr. Parr, ‘all he had done himself’ in the way of educational reform. He, Grote, Joseph Hume, and many of the leading radicals sent pupils to it. Boys were sent over in large numbers from the newly founded republics of South America and from Greece. Matthew Hill's book was translated into Swedish, and
