Alfred Richard Orage - Early Life

Early Life

Born James Alfred Orage in Dacre, near Harrogate, in the West Riding of Yorkshire into a nonconformist religious family, he was generally known as Dickie and he dropped the name James altogether and adopted the middle name Richard. He became a schoolteacher in a Leeds Board elementary school at the age of twenty one and helped to found the Leeds branch of the Independent Labour Party in 1894, writing a weekly literary column for the Labour Leader, from 1895 to 1897. He brought a philosophical outlook to the paper, including in particular the thought of Plato and Edward Carpenter. All in all, Orage devoted seven years of study to Plato, from 1893 to 1900; he also devoted seven years of his life to the study of Nietzsche's philosophy, from 1900 to 1907; from 1907 to 1914 he became a student of the Mahabharata.

By the late 1890s, Orage was disillusioned with conventional socialism and turned for a while to theosophy. In 1900, he met Holbrook Jackson in a Leeds bookshop, and lent him a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita. In return, Jackson lent him Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, which led him to study Nietzsche's work in depth. In 1903, Orage, Jackson and the architect Arthur J. Penty helped to found the lively and successful Leeds Arts Club, with the intention of promoting the work of radical thinkers including G. B. Shaw whom Orage had met in 1898, Henrik Ibsen, and Nietzsche. During this period he returned to socialist platforms but by 1906, he was determined to combine Carpenter's socialism with Nietzsche and theosophy. Concentrating on this and in the presence of Beatrice Hastings was too much for Jean, the wife of his first marriage, the same wife who had shared in his own theosophic and aesthetic interests of his early activities in the Leeds Arts Club, who did not grant him a divorce but went to live instead with Holbrook Jackson and worked the rest of her life as a skilled craftswoman in the tradition of William Morris. In 1906, Beatrice Hastings whose real name was Emily Alice Haigh hailing from Port Elizabeth, a green-eyed beauty of twenty six with literary ambitions, could be seen with Orage and would eventually become a regular contributor to the New Age. By 1907, it became an intimate relationship and as Beatrice Hastings herself would later confess, "... Aphrodite amused herself at our expense."

Orage explored his new ideas in several books. He saw Nietzsche's Übermensch as a metaphor for the "higher state of consciousness" sought by mystics and attempted to define a route to this, insisting this must involve a rejection of civilisation and conventional morality. Instead, he moved through a celebration of Dionysus to declare he was in favour not of an ordered socialism but of an anarchic movement.

In a one-year period, from 1906 to 1907, he published three books, Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superhuman based on his experience with Theosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche: the Dionysian Spirit of the Age and Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism. His rational critique of Theosophy evoked an editorial rebuttal from The Theosophical Review and in 1907, he terminated his association with the Society. The two books on Nietzsche were the first to be published in England as a systematic introduction to Nietzschean thought.