What was Modern? (1910-1914)

What Was The New Age?

THE NEW AGE was published in London under the editorship of Alfred Richard Orage between 1907 and 1922. The journal’s masthead announced it as a weekly review of politics, literature, and art, and as this suggests, it considered aesthetic and cultural issues alongside political and social ones. Neither a mass circulation newspaper aiming to reach the broadest possible readership, nor a little magazine disseminating the tenets of high culture to a coterie audience, The New Age occupied a position somewhere between these two, with a circulation of about 4,500 in 1913. This audience was comprised primarily of middle class intellectuals. But the letters printed in the magazine are evidence that the leading political and artistic figures of the day were also among its readers.

During the years of Orage’s editorship, The New Age published many of Britain’s most important writers, including a number that would subsequently come to be known as literary modernists: Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme and Richard Aldington, among others. The periodical also featured commentary by major social critics, as well as regular columns on books, theatre, music and the visual arts. Its focus was undeniably expansive – articles concerned topics ranging from colonial policy to women’s suffrage and from monetary reform to foreign affairs. Billed by Orage as some neutral ground where intelligences may meet on equal terms NA 2.8:503, the journal deliberately tried to incorporate contributions from opposing perspectives, providing a forum for debate rather than advancing the views of its editors. As such, it became a public platform from which the champions and critics of different ‘modernisms’ could air their opinions and compete for the attention of the British public.