Editor in London
In 1906, he resigned his teaching post and moved to London, following Arthur Penty, another Leeds Art Club friend. Orage attempted to form a league for the restoration of a guild system, much as described by William Morris.
The failure of this project spurred him in 1907, supported by George Bernard Shaw, to buy the weekly magazine The New Age, in partnership with Holbrook Jackson. He quite soon turned it into his conception of a forum for politics, literature and the arts. Although many contributors were Fabians, he to some extent distanced himself from their politics, and a wide range of political viewpoints were represented. The magazine launched an attack on parliamentary politics, while Orage argued the need for utopianism. He also attacked the trade union leadership, while offering some support to syndicalism, and tried to combine this with the guild system. Combining these two viewpoints resulted in Guild socialism, a political philosophy he began to argue for from about 1910.
Between 1908 and 1914 The New Age was undoubtedly the premier little magazine in the UK. It was instrumental in pioneering the British avant-garde, from vorticism to imagism. Some of its contributors at this time included T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Herbert Read and many others. Apart from his undoubted genius as an editor, it might be said that Orage's real talent was as a conversationalist and a 'bringer together' of people. The modernists of London were scattered between 1905 and 1910. Between 1910 and 1914, largely thanks to Orage, a sense of a genuine 'movement' was created. In other words, Orage successfully ran a forum which at least assumed (and perhaps created) a commonality between the seemingly unfathomable philosophies and artistic practices then being created.
Read more about this topic: Alfred Richard Orage
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