About The New Age

The New Age

The New Age, published in London as The New Age: A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art, was a British weekly magazine that ran from 1894 until 1938. Its enduring reputation rested on a shorter period within that span: from 1907 to 1922, when it was edited by Alfred Richard Orage, it was credited as a major influence on literature and the arts, helped to shape modernism in Britain, and was described as the premier little magazine in the country between 1908 and 1914. It published chief political commentators and writers of the day, staged arguments between opposing views on its own pages, and developed guild socialism as a distinctive political philosophy.

The magazine began life in 1894 as a publication of the Christian socialist movement. By 1907, as a radical weekly edited by Joseph Clayton, it was struggling. In May of that year Orage and Holbrook Jackson, who had been running the Leeds Arts Club, took it over with financial help from George Bernard Shaw. Jackson acted as co-editor only for the first year, after which Orage edited it alone until he sold it in 1922. By then his interests had moved toward mysticism, and the quality and circulation of the journal had declined. It survived him as a title until 1938, but its great period ended with his departure.

Origins in Christian Socialism, 1894 to 1907

The New Age began in 1894 as a journal of Christian liberalism and socialism, a weekly voice of the Christian socialist movement. That origin placed it among the many small political and religious weeklies of late Victorian Britain, serving a cause rather than a mass market. Its first phase gave the title continuity and a radical inheritance, but not influence on the wider literary world.

By 1907 the paper was struggling under Joseph Clayton's editorship as a radical weekly. It was then bought as a going concern by a group of backers, among them Shaw and Holbrook Jackson, and passed to the two men who transformed it. The early days of the new regime were marked by a schism, in which the future founders of distributism, notably Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and Arthur Penty, split away from the Fabian socialists who remained with Orage. The argument over the magazine's direction was itself an early sign of the combative intellectual life it was about to lead.

Alfred Richard Orage and Holbrook Jackson

Alfred Richard Orage, born in 1873 in Dacre in Yorkshire, had been a schoolteacher in Leeds for twelve years before he edited The New Age. In Leeds he had helped to found the Leeds Arts Club with Jackson, a centre that promoted Nietzsche, the mystical socialism of the early labour movement, suffragette feminism and literary and artistic modernism. His books on Nietzsche were the first systematic introductions to Nietzschean thought published in Britain. In 1906 he resigned his teaching post and moved to London, following Arthur Penty there, and attempted to form a league for the restoration of the guild system in the spirit of the decentralised socialism of William Morris.

The failure of that guild project spurred Orage, in 1907 and in partnership with Jackson and with Shaw's support, to buy The New Age. Shaw provided substantial initial funding and later called Orage the most brilliant editor for a century past. Orage transformed the magazine into his conception of a forum for politics, literature and the arts. He succeeded as an editor, contemporaries and later scholars agreed, because he was a conversationalist and a bringer-together of people: T. S. Eliot hailed him as the best literary critic of his time, and Gorham Munson described him as not only the best talker he had ever listened to but a veritable fisher of men.

A Forum for Opposing Views

Orage announced in his introductory editorial that the new editors would aim to rally the services of men of good intent of every shade of opinion. The promise was kept in a distinctive way. The New Age published radical, innovative and experimental articles, criticism, literary work and art, and alongside them it published contributions that openly undermined them, including conservative and anti-modernist texts defending a traditional understanding of the world. Ezra Pound praised the magazine for permitting a contributor to express beliefs in direct opposition to those held by the editing staff.

Scholars of the magazine concluded that this oppositional character was deliberate. Orage staged spectacular controversies on his pages in order to attract famous writers, luring them with the prospect of antagonistic encounters, and he used art and literature as instruments of social reform rather than relying only on political commentary and economic analysis. The result was a weekly that was oriented toward both popular and elitist taste, carefully balanced between experimental and conservative content while maintaining a conventional format, and profoundly dedicated to publishing avant-garde work.

Politics: From Fabianism to Guild Socialism

Although many of its contributors were Fabians, Orage distanced the magazine from Fabian politics and sought to represent a wide range of political views. He used The New Age to launch attacks on parliamentary politics and argued the need for utopianism. He also attacked trade union leadership while offering some support to syndicalism, and he tried to combine syndicalism with his ideal of a revived guild system. The combination produced guild socialism, the political philosophy he argued for from about 1910, although the term itself was not mentioned in print until Bertrand Russell referred to it in Political Ideals in 1917.

The paper's political influence was out of proportion to its sale. Its circulation was probably less than 4,000 during its great period, yet it was distributed to influential members of Britain's public sphere, including army officers, colonial governors, teachers and solicitors, and later commentators observed that tens of thousands of people were influenced by the paper who had never even heard its name, because the men and women who read it were men and women who counted. Orage believed that what art and literature were today, life would be tomorrow, and he edited accordingly, treating cultural argument as a form of political action.

The Premier Little Magazine, 1908 to 1914

Between 1908 and 1914 The New Age was the premier little magazine in Britain. It was instrumental in pioneering the British avant-garde, from vorticism to imagism, and helped to create a sense of a modernist movement in London from 1910 onward, when the modernists had previously been scattered. Brown University later summarised its achievement by stating that The New Age helped to shape modernism in literature and the arts from 1907 to 1922.

Its contributors in that period included T. E. Hulme, whose essays on art appeared in its pages, Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and Herbert Read. Read, whose philosophy of art Orage helped to shape, carried the magazine's influence into later twentieth-century criticism. The wider circle of contributors across the Orage years also included H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and Arnold Bennett, so that a single weekly carried Fabian argument, distributist argument, imagist poetry and vorticist art within one set of covers.

Beatrice Hastings and Katherine Mansfield

Among the magazine's most prolific contributors was Beatrice Hastings, who met Orage in 1907, became his partner, and wrote for The New Age in many forms, including correspondence, parody, poetry, polemic, travel writing, prose fiction and dramatic dialogue, much of it under a long list of pseudonyms. Her greatest talent was parody, and she composed parodies of contemporaries including Ezra Pound, Filippo Marinetti and H. G. Wells. She was outspoken in her feminist views, and the magazine's correspondence pages gave her space to develop ideas that informed her 1909 feminist tract, Woman's Worst Enemy: Woman.

Katherine Mansfield's work was first published in The New Age, through Hastings's friendship and support. Mansfield published more than a dozen pieces in Orage's socialist magazine and became a friend and lover of Hastings, who lived with Orage. Her experiences in Germany formed the basis of her first published collection, In a German Pension, in 1911. Although The New Age was often mischaracterised as anti-feminist or anti-suffragist, later scholarship argued that in its early Orage years it served as a crucial forum for feminist fiction and debate, largely thanks to Hastings and Mansfield, on questions of marriage, motherhood, citizenship and sexuality.

Social Credit, Mysticism and Decline

Orage met P. D. Ouspensky in 1914 and began a correspondence with interests that turned increasingly toward metaphysics and mysticism. His conversion in 1918 to the economic analysis of Major C. H. Douglas, whose social credit ideas the magazine then promoted, marked another deliberate break, this time from the attempted synthesis of guild socialism and toward a new doctrine of monetary reform. Three years later his conversion to the system of G. I. Gurdjieff led him away from combining doctrines altogether, toward pursuit of a spiritual teaching that social credit could not accommodate.

As his interests moved toward mysticism, the quality and circulation of the journal declined. Orage sold The New Age in 1921 in some accounts and was recorded generally as having sold it in 1922, when his editorship ended. He then worked with Gurdjieff in France and the United States between 1922 and 1930. Ten years after leaving, he returned to London hoping to resume the editorship and, when that hope was denied, founded a successor instead.

After Orage: Survival to 1938 and the New English Weekly

Without Orage, The New Age continued publication until 1938, a survival of sixteen years that never reproduced its pre-1922 authority. The title's long tail was itself evidence of the distinction between a magazine as a property and a magazine as an editorial creation: the property could be sold and continued, but the forum that had united Hulme, Lewis, Mansfield and Pound had depended on one editor's talent for bringing people together.

Orage's own continuation appeared in April 1932, when he founded The New English Weekly shortly after his return from Paris, intending it to pick up the struggle for Douglas's ideas where he had left off. Contributors included Hilaire Belloc and George Orwell, who contributed a review in June 1932, and the review later published T. S. Eliot's East Coker for the first time in 1940, after Orage's sudden death on 6 November 1934, when Philip Mairet had succeeded him. The New English Weekly's achievements belonged to a separate history, but they demonstrated how completely Orage's contemporaries identified the editor, rather than any proprietor, as the source of The New Age's importance.

Legacy as a Cradle of British Modernism

The New Age was remembered as the British equivalent, in its great years, of the most advanced continental cultural journals, and as the most widely read cultural periodical of its age among the readers who shaped opinion. It had turned a failing organ of Christian socialism into a weekly in which guild socialism was argued into existence, imagism and vorticism were pioneered, Mansfield was first published and Hastings conducted feminist debate under a dozen names.

Its history also left a specific editorial lesson. Orage's method of publishing opponents against each other, of treating a magazine as a meeting place rather than a manifesto, created a modernist movement out of scattered individuals between 1908 and 1914. When he left in 1922 the movement he had convened had already dispersed into other magazines and careers, and the paper that had housed it lived on quietly until 1938, its name surviving its influence by a decade and a half.