The New Age

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The New Age was a British literary magazine, noted for its wide influence under the editorship from 1907 to 1922 of A. R. Orage. It began life in 1894 as a publication of the Christian Socialist movement, but in 1907 Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson, who had been running the Leeds Arts Club, bought the journal with financial help from George Bernard Shaw. Jackson only acted as co-editor for the first year, after which Orage edited it alone until he sold it in 1922. By that time his interests had moved towards mysticism, and the quality and readership of the journal had declined.

Orage and Jackson re-orientated it to promote the ideas of Nietzsche, the Theosophical Society and a form of guild socialism. Opposing viewpoints and arguments were put forward in The New Age, even on topics where Orage had strong opinions. An example is women's right to vote, which was actively debated, despite Orage's hostility to female suffrage.

The journal appeared weekly, and featured a wide cross-section of writers with an interest in literature and the arts, but also politics, spiritualism and economics. The journal was also one of the first places in England in which Sigmund Freud's ideas were discussed before the First World War, in particular by Maurice Eder, an early British psychoanalyst.

The discussions by the group of writers around The New Age affected the development of Fabian socialism, as the form of socialism promoted by the journal was considered such a threat by the mainstream leaders of the Fabian Society, particularly those around Beatrice and Sydney Webb, that they founded the journal The New Statesman to counter its effect. Politically The New Age tended towards Guild socialism and later, after the First World War, towards the more anarchistic Social Credit theory.

"The New Age" was also highly preoccupied with the definition and development of Modernism in the visual arts, literature and music, and consistently observed, reviewed and contributed to the activities of the movement.

With its woodprint illustrations reminiscent of artwork by the German Expressionists, its mixture of culture, politics, Nietzschean philosophy and spiritualism, and its non-standard appearance, The New Age has been cited as as the English equivalent of the German Expressionist periodical Der Sturm, a journal to which it bore a striking resemblance.