Alfred Richard Orage

Who was Alfred Richard Orage?

Alfred Richard Orage was a British intellectual, now best known for editing the magazine The New Age. While working as a schoolteacher in Leeds, he pursued various interests, including Plato, the Independent Labour Party, and theosophy. In 1900 Orage met Holbrook Jackson and three years later they co-founded the Leeds Arts Club, which became a centre of modernist culture in pre-World War I Britain. In 1905, Orage resigned his teaching position and moved to London. There, in 1907, he bought and edited the English weekly The New Age, at first with Holbrook Jackson, and became an influential figure in socialist politics and modernist culture, especially at the height of the magazine's fame before the First World War.

In 1924 Orage sold The New Age and went to France to work with George Gurdjieff, the spiritual teacher P. D. Ouspensky had recommended to him. After spending some time of preliminary training in the Gurdjieff System, Orage was sent to America by Gurdjieff himself to raise funds and lecture on the new system of self-development which emphasized the harmonious work of intellectual, emotional and moving functions.