Introduction

The New Age was founded in 1894 as a Christian socialist journal, edited by the High Anglican Joseph Clayton before it was purchased in 1907 with money provided by George Bernard Shaw and the Theosophist banker Lewis Alexander Wallace, who each stumped up £500 in order to see A. R. Orage and Holbrook Jackson take up the editorial reins. The new series began in May 1907 under a new subtitle, ‘An Independent Socialist Review of Politics, Literature, and Art’. Shaw hoped that the periodical would provide an organ for socialist debate, and in its first year under the co-editorship of Orage and Jackson the New Age essentially served as a wing of the Fabian Society. However, while the subtitle was changed to ‘A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art’ in November 1907, the New Age maintained its commitment to socialism without ever subscribing to any particular policy, party or faction. By the second volume, and after Jackson’s departure in February 1908, Orage shifted attention away from Fabianism, turning the New Age into a far more motley, diverse and culturally dynamic periodical than Shaw had probably envisaged: over the course of Orage’s fifteen years as editor, the New Age provided one of the most important breeding grounds for the emergence of literary and artistic Modernism in early twentieth-century Britain (for more information about his biography and contemporary standing, please see my introduction to Orage in this volume).

The New Age came out every Thursday and was edited from a small office in a courtyard off Chancery Lane, London. Visually, there was nothing eye-catching about the periodical: the New Age was sparse and unassuming, and with its double-column layout and cheap paper quality it looked and felt much like a newspaper, or one of the austere weeklies of the Victorian era. However, such cost-cutting (and the fact that many writers contributed copy for free, earning the periodical the nickname ‘The No Wage’) enabled Orage to keep the New Age priced competitively at one penny. Within months of his editorship, he had established a recognisable format that was maintained consistently across the years with very few alterations: each issue opened with the editorial ‘Notes of the Week’ and was then followed by political commentary, with a cartoon or lithograph splitting this section from the second half of the paper, devoted to art and literature.