SOURCE: Steele, Tom. “1893-1900: Socialism and Mysticism.” In Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, pp. 25-44. Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Steele traces the roots of Orage's early professional and literary influences in attempting to build a explanatory foundation for his later drift towards radical causes.]

Alfred Orage was twenty when he returned to Yorkshire, the county of his birth, in the autumn of 1893. It was the first time since earliest childhood, when on the death of his father his near-penniless mother had returned with him and his sister to the family village of Fenstanton in Huntingdonshire. He had come to Leeds to take up the profession at which his father had so notably failed, schoolteaching. Orage was born in the village of Dacre about fifteen miles north of Leeds on the southern escarpment of Nidderdale. A hundred years later, the birth would have been in the shadow of the dishes of the USAF Menwith Hill listening station, where the etheric communications of all Europe could be overheard. Less than fifty years later Henry Moore would have passed through it on the way to sketch the weird wind-blown rock formations at Birmham just to the north.

Orage's father William died, having drunk his patrimony, when his son was little more than a year old, leaving his wife Sarah Anne to bring the children up as best she could.¹ Back in Fenstanton, Orage was sent to the local school where he excelled in all his subjects and at the non-conformist Sunday school he impressed his teacher, Howard Coote the local squire's son, by his quickness and intelligence. Before long Coote was giving him the run of his library where he was initiated into the high moral discourses of Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and William Morris. At length, through Coote's intervention, he was rescued from his class destiny as plough-boy and sent to Culham training college in Oxfordshire, where, while training to be a teacher, he taught himself the craft of editor.

Through squire Coote's patronage Orage also obtained his teaching post in Leeds. Orage was appointed by Leeds School Board on 26 October 1893, as a trained certificated assistant.² This was possibly to Chapel Allerton School, as John Carswell thinks, but more likely to Ellerby Lane Boys, because in May 1894, just six months later, Orage was reported as having resigned from Ellerby Lane Boys to join the staff of Leylands Mixed School.³ Orage, however, did choose to live in the comfortable suburb of Chapel Allerton whose contrast with the stinking slums of Ellerby Lane and the Leylands could only have been shocking to the country boy.

Earlier in the century Chapel Allerton had been a semi-rural village on the north of Leeds with a reputation for good clean air. Despite the quadrupling of the village population from 1,000 in 1800 to 4,000 in the early 1870s its atmosphere was still almost bucolic, though now it was becoming a respectable suburb. Ellerby Lane, however, was on the edge of the Bank, a densely populated slum on the northern side of the river Aire in the centre of town. It housed an enormous immigrant Irish population, possibly 20,000 strong, described by an inspector some years before as ‘from the wildest parts of Connaught’ and in urgent need of civilizing.⁴ The crowded courts and alleys where disease and pollution were widespread, were the breeding ground for socialists like Tom Maguire. As he waited for the tram to take him into town, the young schoolteacher may well have contemplated the view from Chapel Allerton into Leeds with some trepidation, for the following year, he wrote:

The view of the town from some outlying hill is like a peep from Abraham's bosom into the abode of Dives. Here on the height the air is fresh to the lungs … But yonder, down there, the infernal pot is boiling, and the steam hangs like a nightmare over the city. Dantes need no Virgil to show them Hell; and Miltons need not be blind. There, night and day, thousands of chimneys are allowed to belch out their poisonous breaths to be inhaled by human lungs below.⁵

and as for the river below the Bank

The Aire is simply a huge sewer: it has the filth of Leeds in suspension. Unlike the Jordan seven dips therein would cause, not cure leprosy … it has been transformed into the oily-flowing mud stream, into whose waters no fish dare venture, on whose banks no leaves can breathe, no trees may grow.

Although it was in the suburb he settled, Orage chose what he called in the same article ‘a knight errantry’ in the boiling pot of the slums. Both Mairet and Carswell think that he lived in the end of a stone terrace called Ingle Row, which is opposite perhaps the prettiest police station cum public library in Leeds, though this cannot be confirmed from the Ward Roles. By 1896 he had moved down into Harehills a mile or so into town, but by 1900 had moved back again to Chapel Allerton.

Like Ellerby Lane Boys, the Leylands School no longer stands. It too was in a densely populated area of Leeds close to the centre of town across the York Road from the Bank. It was just starting to receive the first wave of Eastern European Jews fleeing from the pogroms, later swelling to a population of 15,000. Jews and Irish regarded each other uneasily across the York Road, occasionally skirmishing. Orage taught there for only a year and a half. In January 1896 he joined his third school, Harehills Board School, where he taught older children, probably eleven or twelve years old in Standard VI.

In September 1896, Orage received his first annual pay rise of £5, something he apparently forgot to tell Philip Mairet who was under the impression he never earned more than his initial salary of £80 a year. He remained here for three and a half years now living with his wife Jean in a small terraced house at 86 Elford Place, little more than a hundred yards away. The school log book noted that he was absent through illness for a day and a half—only marginally more disruptive than the arrival of Barnum and Bailey's Circus in 1899, for which the school closed the entire day.⁶ Here he was befriended by Cyril Arthington Pease, a fellow teacher who possessed the rare distinction of a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford, but, not certificated, was paid even less than Orage. From a substantial middle-class family, Pease was also an active member of the ILP. He was one of those who had joined because he could not tolerate the idea that his privileges had been acquired at the expense of the impoverishment of the many and had posed the question for himself ‘How can I live without robbing someone else?’

Like Orage, he had chosen to teach in a poor working-class area. He left Leeds ten years later to found a school run on progressive lines in Letchworth Garden City, in its pioneering days, and in 1905 invited Orage to join him. But by this time Orage had his eyes on higher things and passed the opportunity over to his colleague Millie Browne (later Price). In September 1897 Orage's pay was increased by another £5 but, the record shows, he declined to join the board's annuity scheme, preferring to put his trust for the future in his own wit rather than municipal thrift.

Harehills Board School was purpose built and founded in 1891. It was designed by William Landless in the Queen Anne style with ‘scroll gables, broken rooflines and tall windows’⁷ deemed appropriately uplifting by the board, but still overcrowded and underequipped judging from the HMI's reports summarized in the log: ‘The population of the area is increasing so rapidly that the accommodation provided in this large school only opened three years ago is already inadequate and in spite of the use of large central halls for classes some of the class rooms are constantly overcrowded.’⁸ Nevertheless the inspectors praised the school's tone, discipline and instruction. But, in another unexplained move in October 1899, now on a wage of £95, Orage returned to Ellerby Lane Boys where he remained until August 1902.

His last teaching post in Leeds was at Roundhay Road Boys which he joined on 25 August 1902. Like Harehills School, a little over a quarter of a mile away beyond some of the densest back-to-back housing in Europe, the school was new and imposing. The log records him as being absent once because of his sister's illness in December 1902, once due to matters of importance detaining him in early November 1903 and for nearly two weeks in early December of that year apparently without cause.⁹ In June 1903 he had also been to Amsterdam for ‘Miss Shaw's funeral’ for three and a half days. The following year at the same time he was also in Amsterdam for seven days for a conference, almost certainly an international theosophy conference, to which Orage was one of the English delegates. He was away on only five other occasions in the three years at the school, the only cause given being, ‘neuralgia’, meant he was almost certainly exhausted. On 13 March 1905 he took a morning off because of his wife's illness. The doctor apparently suspected an infectious disease but sent a certificate with Orage in the afternoon saying it was safe for him to return. He finally left the school and Leeds School Board's employ not, as is usually given, in the summer but on 22 December 1905. It was supposed to be a temporary six months' leave of absence ‘in order to write a book’ but he never returned.

The Leeds School Board was the second largest in the country and one of the most progressive. Compared with the voluntary schools which they replaced the 45 new schools which the Board had built since the Education Act of 1870 seemed ‘veritable people's palaces … lighter, loftier, better ventilated, more convenient in every way’. The board had set out to transform the condition of the children of Leeds and, according to a later educationalist, ‘had in truth proved themselves to be great civilising and humanising agencies’ who had turned out ‘children who were disciplined and drilled in the rudiments of the three Rs’.¹⁰ The Education Act's author, W. E. Forster, who was the brother-in-law of Matthew Arnold, was the Member of Parliament for Leeds neighbouring town, Bradford, where Margaret MacMillan had recently done so much pioneering work. Orage had come to Leeds during the great educational revolution, when it was fervently hoped by liberals and progressives that education would save the nation from anarchy. How far he was ever convinced by this is difficult to know but after only a year at the chalkface, he gave eloquent voice to his disillusion:

Education has deluded the human race: it is bringing us to the wrong millennium. It promised us liberty; it oathed us equality; it hinted at fraternity. It pointed with prophetic finger to the perfection of man: Utopia was to be reached by easy stages and short cuts. Thus it piped and we have danced ever since: and the dancing is nigh killing us … Men are no longer their own, they have been bought with the results of the ‘self-denials’ of capitalists.¹¹

He may at some stage have chosen to teach standard I, the very youngest of the schoolchildren, to free himself for extra-mural intellectual, political and other pursuits. Mary Gawthorpe was of the opinion that ‘Standard I certainly gave more time for reading’ but she also felt that ‘Orage liked to teach little children because of an innate modesty. Washing the feet of little children was the idea which persisted’,¹² a sentiment echoed by Mairet, who thought that he was a highly gifted teacher and a great success with children ‘following all their sayings and doings with rapt interest’.¹³ Millie Browne, on the other hand, remembered his advice to her on becoming a teacher was to ‘Use the cane steadily for the first month, then put it away and never take it out again’.¹⁴ His late time-keeping put him in bad odour with the authorities who occasionally suspended his annual increments and denied him advancement. Despite this, he was popular with both children and colleagues and active in the local branch of the National Union of Teachers.

In 1894, Orage had joined the newly formed Leeds branch of the Independent Labour Party. He became a socialist, says Mairet, by hearing Tom Mann, whom he regarded as the greatest orator he had ever heard, address a rally in Sheffield. But it is likely that local socialist leaders such as Tom Maguire, who died the following year at the age of 27, were just as important. Like Mann, Maguire was also a charismatic figure who was remembered by his friend Edward Carpenter as ‘daring yet cautious, a dreamer and yet a man of action’.¹⁵ A small consumptive figure, he was a photographer's assistant who preferred poetry to party politics and died tragically of tuberculosis when his political powers were at their height.

Though small, the socialist movement in Leeds had been intensely active in the previous decade, culminating in the gas workers' strike of 1890 and Maguire was, in Carpenter's words, the ‘mainspring and inspirer of the movement in Leeds’.¹⁶ This famous victory for the socialists succeeded in breaking the hold over the local labour movement of the Liberal Party and laid the foundations for independent labour representation. E. P. Thompson went so far as to claim ‘if we must have one man who played an outstanding role in opening the way for the ILP, that man was a semi-employed Leeds-Irish photographer in his late twenties—Tom Maguire’.¹⁷ Maguire and Orage collaborated on ILP propaganda. The Fabian Society branches, which had blossomed in the early nineties, decamped wholesale, according to Alf Mattinson, into the ILP upon its formation in 1893.¹⁸

The significance of the strength of northern provincial radicalism inherent in the formation of the ILP cannot be underestimated. As the historian of the Christian Socialist Movement, Peter d'A Jones has suggested the London Fabians misunderstood this while the Manchester factory owner Frederick Engels saw it very clearly. He told his friend Sorge: ‘The Fabians here in London are a band of careerists who have understanding enough to realise the inevitability of the social revolution, but who could not possibly entrust this tremendous task to the crude proletariat alone, and are therefore kind enough to set themselves at the head.’¹⁹ True dynamism would come from ‘the rush towards socialism in the provinces,’ not from London, ‘the home of cliques’. If only ‘the petty private ambitions and intrigues of the London would-be great men are now held in check somewhat, and the tactics do not turn out too wrong-headed, the Independent Labour Party may succeed in detaching the masses from the Social Democratic Federation, and in the provinces, from the Fabians too, and then force unity.’ A few weeks later Engels added:

Lancashire and Yorkshire are again taking the lead in this movement too, as in the chartist movement. People like Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw and the like, who wanted to permeate the Liberals with socialism, must now allow themselves to be permeated by the spirit of the working-men members of their own society … Either they remain alone, officers without soldiers, or they must go along.

By the time he came to Leeds this great wave of activism was subduing and a long-term realignment of politics was emerging in which organizational problems took precedence. Asked later to contribute to a pamphlet on why he joined the ILP, Orage was characteristically flippant, using the opportunity for a lesson in intuitionist philosophy.

Well you see, I joined first and found out afterwards. Most people flatter themselves that they look before they leap: as a matter of fact, very few people indeed look until they have leapt; and the few who do never leap at all, and go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unloved, unmarried and unhung. The truth is Nature is too wise to make men too wise, and it is only in life's unimportant details, such as choosing a cigar or electing an M. P., that she allows us the chance of bungling … Do you suppose a young man weighs the probable results of his falling in love, or even thinks anything about its results before he falls? … As touch is the primary material sense, whence all the others spring, so the primary mental sense, of which thought, imagination, reason are mere modifications is Feeling. After all, you cannot be an optimist with a sluggish liver, nor a philosopher with the toothache. I joined the I. L. P. because I felt it the right thing for me to do: I continue in the I. L. P. because I know it is. The feeling, however, came first, and the reasons, in plenty, came afterwards.²⁰

The ILP quickly recognized Orage's literary talents and immediately commissioned articles for a propaganda leaflet with the title of Hypnotic Leeds, in 1895. It was edited by the founder of the Fabian Society in Leeds in 1891, Albert Marles, and other contributors included Tom Maguire and Joseph Clayton, (from whom Orage later purchased the New Age). Orage's articles were heavily coded literary pieces which discoursed the matter of Leeds's slumdom and poverty through biblical and classical references in the manner of Ruskin or Arnold (as can be seen from the extracts quoted earlier). The first, ‘A Study in Mud’ on the evils of Leeds slums advocated a secular mission or ‘true Aristocracy’, who would ‘build their houses and live their lives in the slums’. In the second article, ‘Quixotic Energy’ (very quixotically for a teacher in his first year in post) he titled at the ‘payment by results’ system in schools for its mechanical suppression of the child's innate creativity in favour of discipline and instruction (what D. H. Lawrence later called ‘the din-din-dinning of Board Schools’).²¹ Orage sounded a clarion call of libertarianism in the traditionally conservative profession of teachers, which, as John Carswell perceptively notes, subsequently became a willing constituency for his writing,

The new battalions of teachers required by the Education Act had to be sought in the schools of villages and slums for the possessing classes were neither numerous enough nor willing to see their children take up teaching on weekdays. The process was at work all over England, with immense social consequences for it had created, in three decades, a large and unprecedented social category, more than half of which consisted of women … here was the rank and file for womens rights, and a public for progressive journalism on a scale never known before. The teacher training programme not only gave Orage his first career: it gave him the audience for his second.²²

His masters on the Leeds School Board, who prided themselves on their humane approach, may well have responded to Orage's challenge for the payments by results system was indeed abolished in 1897. However the dominant purpose in the board was still that of sanitizing the new generation rather than releasing creative energies.

Orage's involvement with the socialist movement was as much because of his passion for argument as conviction by its ideas. Mairet talks of him laying down his books on a summer's evening and strolling over to the newly laid-out Hyde Park on Woodhouse Moor, where socialist orators would be arguing the point with hecklers in the crowd. Orage would quietly intervene by picking holes in the heckler's argument, lead him into self-contradiction and then in a triumph of Socratism, ‘deliver judgement with clarity, wit and humour’. The socialists, of course, welcomed him with open arms and for about four years he became one of the ILP's most energetic, though not wholly reliable, activists.

He flexed his own oratorical muscles on many occasions, once to a rally of eight thousand on Hunslet Moor on May Day 1896.²³ Soon a popular lecturer and debater, he lectured a number of times to the Central ILP Club in Leeds and was entrusted with leading off for the ILP in debates against other organizations. The Labour Leader reported on 1 February 1896, a lecture to Halton (Leeds) ILP club was filled to utmost capacity, noting ‘Socialism is making itself felt in Halton’. On 4 November he lectured at Yeadon and on 22 November chaired a meeting at which the Fabian leader and early advocate of Nietzsche, Hubert Bland, lectured on German socialism. In addition he regularly chaired the Sunday meetings of the Central ILP club.

He lectured to other ILP branches also and it seems that he often used these opportunities to develop cultural themes. At a meeting attended by Millie Browne, who thought the ILP members ‘a drab uncultured lot’, Orage addressed the York ILP branch on Shelley's ‘Prometheus Unbound’. She appears to have been as much impressed by the speaker as the subject:

… one meeting I went to was epoch making for me. A speaker was announced named A. R. Orage, and he was billed to speak on Shelley's Prometheus unbound. I listened spellbound as he read the rhythmical visionary verses, and attempted to interpret the mythological characters of the lovely but abstruse and metaphysical drama. I did not understand it at all, but I was fascinated by the lecturer. He was about twenty six at the time, nine years older than I was; tall and slender with a head noble as an Arab horse, which with his thick dark lock of hair falling in moments of eloquence over his forehead, he rather resembled. One of his dark eyes was spotted with gold, and that side of his face showed a dark golden stain where in his youth acid had been flung at him. His mouth was full and mobile, his manner of speech was golden also.²⁴

Millie Price's attraction to Orage seems to have typified that of many young women teachers.

In July 1895 Orage began his career as political columnist with the first of his regular contributions to the ILP weekly paper, the Labour Leader, edited by Keir Hardie. In November these became his famous column, ‘A Bookish Causerie’, indicating that it was not merely conventional book reviewing but an attempt to change and reform the readers' tastes and appetites. To call his contribution a ‘column’ is somewhat misleading since it often occupied one-third to three-quarters of a page. It represented many hours of books devoured and thousands of words written, for which he received 5 shillings a piece to add to his meagre teacher's stipend. The journalistic company he kept was uplifting as, occasionally, the same page sees an article by William Morris at his head and another by Tom Mann at his feet. He kept the words flowing for about two years but in July 1897 the last contribution made its appearance. It cannot have been anything but an enormous taxing of his energies, Quixotic or otherwise.

A second venture into political journalism was offered to Orage by an ILP shopkeeper in Holbeck, who started ‘a freely distributed propaganda sheet’ called Forward from his own resources in October 1896. Under Orage's editorship the sheet was soon enlarged and expanded to a print run of 50,000 per month and distributed citywide. The shopkeeper, D. B. Foster, who became the founding secretary of the Leeds Labour Party, later wrote:

… this effort to provide Socialist propaganda for the whole city brought around me quite a number of very helpful comrades amongst whom I well remember the name of … Mr. A R Orage, who for some years now has been the editor of the ‘New Age’ as he really was of ‘Forward’ though my name was nominally associated with that position.²⁵

Another contributor to Forward was the pioneer socialist and feminist, Isabella Ford, who wrote a regular women's political page called ‘Up and Down the World’. From a well-established Liberal Quaker family, Miss Ford became an enthusiastic leader of the ILP and later one of the first supporters of the Leeds Arts Club, serving for a while as a committee member. Older and wiser, it is unlikely that she was affected by Orage in the same way as Millie Browne but Orage probably benefited from her company and that of her sisters Emily and Bessie at the Central ILP Club sessions in Briggate. The sisters were amongst the first members of the ILP in 1893 and brought many influential contacts into the club. Both William Morris and Peter Kropotkin had stayed at the sisters' house in Adel, as had a whole galaxy of agitators, political refugees and labour leaders. Edward Carpenter was also a regular visitor. Alf Mattinson recorded in his obituary of Bessie that during the 1890s, when the impoverished young socialists had sought the generosity of the Ford sisters,

… the movement in Leeds entered on its palmiest days. Never before nor since those few years when the club radiated such activities has the Labour or Socialist cause shown the same enthusiasm, the same fighting spirit, or possessed such a galaxy of diversified talent.²⁶

Isabella Ford also wrote a number of novels of industrial class struggle and the fight for women's independence during the 1890s, one of which On the Threshold, Orage reviewed as essentially ‘a book of women for men and women’ adding, ‘Simple and even absent as the plot may seem, and weak in places as the style may be, there are scenes of real life among real people, touches of homely unaffected pathos, which make “On the Threshold” not only readable but re-readable’.²⁷

In 1896 Orage was married to Jean Watson whom he had met when he was a student at Culham College and she an art student at the Royal College.²⁸ Already a theosophist, it was probably she who introduced him to the Theosophical Society. The flourishing Northern Federation headquarters was then in Harrogate where many of its national illuminati were regular visitors. Here Orage first met Annie Besant, Cyril Leadbeater and G. R. S. Mead. Though still committed to the ILP Orage was depressed by its ‘materialism’ and lack of vision. His own strong mystical bent could not find expression even in his causeries and so he turned to theosophy to cultivate his esoteric interests. He once again ran into Millie Browne, who recalled:

The Theosophical Society … opened out an avenue of interest and friendship. Harrogate was the hub of the Northern Federation of the T. S. There quarterly meetings were held attended by such famous theosophists as Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, A. P. Sinnett, G. R. S. Mead, Jinaragadasa … I was elated at coming into contact with so many big names—sometimes I wonder whether I am an instinctive lion hunter who knows perhaps Carlyle's Hero and Hero Worship had bred this in me. I had not much time for theosophic study, but turned to Edward for instruction. He and Orage were friends so I met ARO again and he found my mind interesting.²⁹

The idealist and occultist, to say nothing of other, leanings in Orage were well fed by these meetings. Theosophy, under Besant's leadership, was also a progressive social movement and one that did not discriminate between race, creed or sex in its membership. It was one of the few societies women might happily join and contribute to more or less equally with men. Orage, however, was not content simply to listen to Millie Browne's ‘lions’ and soon became one. Before long he was a regular lecturer at theosophical meetings, though what he had to say often disturbed the more orthodox, particularly when it took a Nietzschean turn after 1900. Nevertheless he published a number of articles in the Theosophical Review and a series of his lectures given to the Theosophical Lodges of Manchester and Leeds was published by the society under the title Consciousness, Animal, Human, and Superman in 1907. He also wrote a number of children's stories for the young people's magazine The Lotus Journal.³⁰

Almost certainly Orage was studying the classical works of eastern mysticism by the mid-nineties. Many had only recently appeared in translation, though the second edition of Annie Besant's translation of the Bhagavad Gita, his favoured text, had come out in 1896. Mairet's suggestion that his growing powers of oratory were now exercised less on socialist platforms than in philosophic exposition is confirmed by Stanley Pierson, who sees Orage's shift of direction as part of a cultural trend:

During the late 90s as the Socialist movement declined, Orage became a prominent speaker on the theosophical platforms of the North … like Carpenter and others in the socialist movement he was blending the mysticism of the east with the evolutionary optimism of late Victorian culture to provide a new foundation for personal and social hopes.³¹

Orage's mystical temperament was in fact directly encouraged by Edward Carpenter who was, as an Oxford University Extension lecturer and socialist activist, a regular visitor to Leeds. During the 1890s he lived in a cottage in the village of Millthorpe near Sheffield where he welcomed Annie Besant, Olive Schreiner and many more figures in the New Life movement. His own writing and poetry were especially influential. Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889) inspired Arthur Penty to write his Restoration of the Gild System (1906), and Love's Coming of Age (1896), it has been argued, deeply influenced D. H. Lawrence and formed the ideological structure of The Rainbow and Women in Love.³² But it was his long poem Towards Democracy (1883) which had the greatest impact on Alfred Orage.

Orage's relationship to Carpenter began much as had Carpenter's to Walt Whitman to whom he had written in 1874, ‘There are many in England to whom your writings have been as the waking up to a new day … (you) are the centre of a new influence’³³ and he believed the force of the new will to change was feminine, ‘Yet the women will save us …’ This feminized element in the new socialism should not be underestimated and there is no doubt that however cynically Orage's relationships with women might be viewed, he was influenced by it. For a while Carpenter was Orage's mentor. Something of this is revealed in a letter to Carpenter in February 1896.³⁴ The letter, addressed from 86 Elford Place, Rounday Road, Leeds, humbly hopes that Carpenter has noticed his Bookish Causerie column in the Labour Leader and feels that although he is unknown to Carpenter, ‘I may write to you as a friend’.

… you will see that I have been attempting though with much less success than I had hoped to read modern literature in the light of the new old conception you and Whitman have done so much to spread. And I want if it be in my power to go still further and more persistently into what inwardly I feel the deepest need for thousands like myself.

He goes on to say that this need is for a sure foundation for the more or less transitory intellectual, physical and ethical beliefs, and regrets the lack of unity of purpose in his Labour Leader pieces:

But now with your help I would do better. Some comrades have written me asking for some notes on ‘Towards Democracy’ as my lover comrade and ‘hers’ have long felt even since we read you out in the mystic air of Perth pine woods that ‘Towards Democracy’ is just the book for comrades.

Orage wanted to write a series of articles which may help ‘those who read to understand and those who do not understand to read’ and he asked Carpenter to read his articles before they went to print. Carpenter's reply is unrecorded, though it was almost certainly affirmative and two articles on ‘Towards Democracy’ duly appeared in the Labour Leader in June 1896. Though initially it was a relationship of devout discipleship, Orage's affiliations soon shifted and the tone of reverence notable in the letter changed. By February 1897 he remarks in his Bookish Causerie, ‘Carpenter without Karl Marx is useless’. Later during the early Arts Club period, 1904 or 1905, in a discussion with Holbrook Jackson on the relationship of Carpenter and Whitman, Jackson reports him as saying that Carpenter was in truth ‘Mrs. Whitman’.³⁵ Nevertheless, Carpenter was an extremely popular lecturer at the Arts Club and was made an honorary member, along with Chesterton and Shaw, in 1905. Orage also named him in a note at the end of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian Spirit of the Age (1906) as one of an elite band of living authors who might be considered ‘Dionysian’.

But Carpenter's influence may well, with Jean's, have turned him to the Theosophical Society in 1896, in one of his recurrent moods of despair with socialist materialism. His brand of socialism, as we have seen, was anyway strongly idealist and was now embellished with Carpenter's visionary utopianism. Carpenter was also close to Annie Besant, not only a theosophist but a pioneering socialist and feminist whose activities frequently brought her to Leeds and the West Riding. Alf Mattinson, for example, records having heard her speak a number of times on the steps of Leeds Town Hall in the late 1880s, on freethought and socialism. On one occasion he and other Socialist Leaguers had had to rescue her from a hostile crowd who were after her ‘atheist’ blood.³⁶ More pertinent perhaps, was that Annie Besant had, on 13 May 1895, given a lecture in Leeds which could not have failed to grip the young schoolteacher's imagination: ‘Man the Master of his Destiny’.

The theosophical movement had arrived in Leeds at almost the same time as Orage. The inaugural meeting of the Northern Federation of the TS was held in Leeds on 5 August 1893 with 30 members present, including G. R. S. Mead.³⁷ Although a regular Leeds TS lodge seems to have existed from 1895, Orage does not seem to have been a member of it. Instead he and Jean appear to have set up a mysteriously named ‘Alpha Centre’ and applied for admission to the Federation in May 1898.

Jean Orage represented the Alpha Centre at Northern Federation meetings until 1900, often in the company of future Arts Club founders, Arthur Hugh Lee and A. W. Waddington. The Leeds TS lodge then seems to have been refounded in 1900. A certificate on the wall of the lodge's meeting rooms (still those opened by Annie Besant in 1911) in Queens Square, Leeds, reads that it was founded on 19 September 1900. The names of the founders include Alfred and Jean Orage, W. H. Bean and Miss A. K. Kennedy (Jean's cousin), who also became founder members of the Leeds Arts Club three years later. The Federation minute books still list a ‘Leeds Centre’ as well as a Leeds Lodge in 1907 but it has only one member. For the moment this remains an anomaly, though the explanation may owe as much to the internal politics of TS as to Orage's unorthodox approach. His temperament was also such that he was only happy in a group he led or founded.

As his commitment to the ILP declined, so his energy for theosophy increased and by 1900 he had become a regular lecturer at Northern Federation conferences. The record shows the following list of his lectures: 3 November 1900, ‘Can we afford to neglect Metaphysics?’; 11 May 1901, ‘The Neglect of beauty’ (to which Arthur Penty contributes); 2 November 1901, ‘Thought Power its control and culture’; 10 May 1902, ‘Problems of Karma’; 29 November 1902, Orage leads discussion on ‘What is the Personality?’; 20/21 February 1904, ‘Methods of Lodge Work’. At the next federation meeting he was minuted to give a paper on ‘Animal Consciousness’ (also Jean Orage to give paper on ‘Metempsychosis’); 30 July 1904, ‘Animal Consciousness’ (Annie Besant in Chair); 11 January 1906, ‘Theosophy and Modern Physical Science’; and 24 February 1906, ‘Theosophical Ideas in Commercial and Professional Life’.

As a regular Leeds lodge delegate he also contributed to organizational work: 2 February 1901, when he suggested that the next meeting's discussion topic should be ‘Is Happiness Brotherhood?’ ‘(On the Neglect of beauty)’ and was noted as joining in the discussion on ‘Our attitude towards Christian Enquirers’. Between this date and July 1904, he was the Leeds delegate on fourteen more occasions. At the council meeting of 21 February 1903, he and Jean contributed to a discussion on ‘Policy and Methods of Propaganda’. He also offered to give a range of talks to local branches on theosophical and cultural matters, including ‘What is Mysticism?’ ‘Theory of Reincarnation’, ‘Man and His Bodies’, ‘Some Hindu Short Stories’, ‘Theosophy and Literature’, ‘Nietzsche and Ibsen’, ‘The Republic of Plato’, ‘Theosophy and Modern Psychology’, ‘The Future of Humanity’, ‘What Theosophists are aiming at’, ‘Animal Evolution’ and ‘The Power of Thought’,³⁸ an altogether ambitious programme of grass-roots education in popular philosophy.

Two other founders of the Arts Club also joined the programme. Rev. A. H. Lee offered ‘Religious Ideas of the Celtic Races’, ‘Psychology and Religion’, ‘Browning and His Message’, ‘Objects of the Society for Psychical Research’ and ‘Myers' Human Personality’, while A. W. Waddington suggested ‘Conventionality’ and ‘Mediaeval Guilds’. Waddington may also have come to theosophy along the same route as Orage. In 1896 he had been the secretary of Carpenter's Sheffield Socialist Society and had subsequently taken up New Life living with fellow architect, Arthur Penty. As Millie Price later recalled: ‘A. J. Penty brought his Ruskinian ethics to cooperate with “Waddy” in producing furniture of simple, undecorated and unpolished woods, and the two furnished themselves a cottage as an example of what craftsmanship could do, and there in the country lived for a while an austere Thoreauesque kind of a life.’³⁹

Orage was also elected to the English Committee of the International Congress and spoke on the international correspondence scheme. In July he was elected to the subcommittee to discuss the next international congress and at the same meeting proposed that his paper, on ‘Animal Consciousness’, which he presented to the conference on that day, with Annie Besant in the chair, be published as ‘Transactions’. (‘Animal Consciousness’ in fact became the first part of Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman, published by the Theosophical Publishing Society, in 1907). He proposed for the next conference, papers on ‘Art and the Arts’ in order to define the value of the arts in education and to discover the relative importance and place of the arts in human life. His paper on F. H. Myers's theory of human personality which he had been lecturing on to the Leeds lodge in 1904 was published in ‘Transactions’ as ‘Man and Death’.⁴⁰ Though present at the council meeting of 13 May 1905, when his friend Waddington was elected secretary of the discussions committee, he resigned suddenly from it in August. Not surprisingly, the reason given was ‘strain of overwork’.⁴¹

However, Millie Price revealed that it was not all metaphysics and astral bodies at the Harrogate meetings as occasionally Orage attended to more corporeal ones: hers.

When at a Theosophical conference at Harrogate Orage suggested we should play truant for one session and take a stroll on Harlow Moor. I was thrilled with delight at contacting his exciting mind in an intimate way. For he had an exciting mind. He excited himself with brilliant speculations on the structure of the soul and the universe. The doctrines of what was then called ‘Esoteric Buddhism’ were the most fruitful in this respect and he devoted himself to lectures on these being daringly imaginative and convincing. His mind too was crammed with poetical literature so that I owe to him my early knowledge of Yeats, for he had seized upon my copy of the Wanderings of Oisin, purloined from Dr. O'Leary's collection, and read to my entranced ears:

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley fields
Yellow the leaves of rowan above us
And yellow the wet, wild strawberry leaves.

stressing its colour values in the words used. Craftily he read also To An Isle In The Water:—‘Shy one, shy one shy one of my heart’ …

and the rest can be guessed at, presumably in the absence of Jean Orage for whom Millie had an awed respect. She tells of many more trysts and holidays by the seaside together which, though romantic, appear to have been unconsummated. Orage, she said, called her the ‘Ice Maiden’.⁴²

Theosophy carried Orage through his remaining ten years in Leeds including his discovery of Nietzsche and the formation of the Arts Club … and provided him with a circle of friends and an audience for his experimental humanism more congenial than the ILP. He carried many of these like Lee and Waddington into the Arts Club with him and through it he reached a far wider social spectrum than was otherwise available to a schoolteacher of modest means. It was probably his rites of passage into a wealthy social group which included academics, businessmen and bankers, one of whom subsequently put up half the cash for the New Age. How convinced he was by theosophy, as opposed to finding it a congenial vehicle for his own ideas, is another matter.

He may have belonged to theosophy's inner esoteric section. Like W. B. Yeats and Florence Farr, both of whom later visited the Arts Club on more than one occasion, though Ellic Howe does not mention him, he might have become a magician of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric offshoot of theosophy, formed in 1888 by Macgregor Mathers.⁴³ Orage was later taken up with Aleister Crowley, the beast himself, who was briefly leader of the order, and according to Beatrice Hastings, would have filled the New Age's pages with his ‘turgid out-pourings’ had she not prevented him.⁴⁴ Ms. Hastings, a brilliant though erratic talent had herself met Orage at a theosophical meeting in London in 1906, when he had jumped up on the stage in the absence of the advertised speaker, to give an impromptu lecture, and shortly after became his lover. She wrote that after about a year,

when Aphrodite had amused herself at our expense, I found a collection of works on sorcery. Up to this time, Orage's intimate friend was not Mr. Holbrook Jackson, who thought he was, but Mr. Aleister Crowley. … Well, I consigned all the books and ‘Equinoxes’ and sorcery designs to the dustbin.⁴⁵

She lived with Orage for some years in London, at one time sharing their apartment, and possibly Orage himself, with Katherine Mansfield, becoming virtually co-editor of the New Age. When she parted company with him (later to live with Modigliani) she accused him, with her customary acrimony, of ‘paranoic mystagoguery’!

Though Beatrice's account has been contested by others of the New Age circle, Orage told C. S. Nott some years later, that he had met Crowley when he, Orage, was acting secretary of the Society for Psychical Research in 1906. The poet, Edwin Muir, remembers Orage as having been ‘a member of a magic circle which included Yeats’ which James Webb, the historian of the modern occult movement, thought must have been the Golden Dawn, which had split up into quarrelling factions in 1900, with Yeats and Crowley on opposite sides of the fence. Webb also refers to a Golden Dawn temple in Bradford—there is no record of one in Leeds—but it seems unlikely that the leading theosophical lecturer of the North could have avoided coming into contact with some of its members. The temple in Bradford has recently been rediscovered and there is a short account of it in a local occultist journal. The anonymous writer notes ‘There was a particularly active occult scene around this time in Yorkshire. A number of mysterious groups existed such as the Rosicrucian Fathers of Keighley … and the less mysterious August and Oriental Order of Light Garuda which was based in Bradford.’⁴⁶ In a more serious and sustained study Logie Barrow has shown that the West Riding had been one of the most important centres of spiritualist activity in Britain since its arrival from the USA in the mid-nineteenth century.⁴⁷ Subsequently many spiritualists joined the re-invigorated socialist movement and the ILP, imparting to it some of their own utopianism. Support for Orage's dabbling in magic might come from the fact that his diary of engagements was so full that astral-planning was the only possible way of getting from one to the next.

Back in the real world, in 1897 he and Jean moved to an apartment at 3 Exmouth Grove, Harehills, owned appropriately enough by a Mrs. Tempest. Whether Orage was still pronouncing his name as it had been spelt in Cambridgeshire or whether his new landlady had put ideas into his head would be interesting to know. After all, as Carswell remarks, a hint of stormy Huguenot ancestory in one's surname has to be more impressive than something that rhymes, as Shaw used to say, with ‘porridge’. Nameplaying may well have been a passing diversion for a man still attempting to construct his persona. On the Ward Role of 1898, for example, he even enters himself as Alfred O'Rage! Another move, in 1898, took him to 11 Rossington Place, Harehills, and then in 1899 up the hill to 36 Hawthorne Mount, Chapel Allerton, where he stayed until 1905. His final Leeds address was 33 Potternewton Road, which was where Mary Gawthorpe remembered receiving a certain corporeal communication.

As for his intellectual movements between 1898 and 1900, he was certainly not merely sinking into spiritualism. But he had given up his Bookish Causerie in 1897 and his editorship of Forward in 1898, when it passed into more orthodox hands, and appears not to have published any more journalism until 1902. His school work at Harehills, teaching the older children of standard VI, with classes of 50 and more was undeniably demanding, but a notebook dating from this time suggests that he was still devouring books at a great rate. He appears to have read most of George Gissing, some Henry James, Kipling, Mark Twain, R. L. Stevenson, Alexander Dumas, a range of oriental and biblical texts, romantic poets and cultural criticism. The biggest single entry is from the Philosophical Dialogues of the French essayist, Ernest Renan, critical of what he called ‘the acid of reasoning’. One quotation Orage has copied, points forward to the Arts Club and Nietzsche: ‘Endeavour to be beautiful and then do act every moment as your heart inspires you’.⁴⁸

In the meantime he had to earn a living and became an active though not especially successful member of the National Union of Teachers. In 1898 he stood for election to the Leeds and District executive but succeeded in coming only twenty-second in the poll. The following year he did even worse, getting fewer votes and coming twenty-seventh. But in 1901 he was successful, collecting 157 votes and coming eighth in the poll. Despite this his victory was short-lived. In the following year's election although he picked up nearly 90 votes more, he and most of the other sitting members were swept off the executive in a wave of revolt.⁴⁹ A slate of candidates organized by the Direct Representation Association opposing the 1902 Education Bill carried the day. They objected to non-certified teachers being transferred to board schools as cheap labour with the merging of the voluntary sector, but Orage does not appear to have sympathized.

His involvement in the NUT may have been more motivated by its potential as a platform for his own ideas, for, in a letter to the Leeds Teacher's Journal, he complains about the misuse of something called the NUT ‘Literary Branch’ which sounds like an institution Orage himself may have thought up:

Referring to the announcement made by the Literary branch of a series of lectures (September 1902 p. 3) may I enquire whether the original intention of the branch has been deliberately or only thoughtlessly lost sight of. From what I can remember it was the object of the branch to provide primarily opportunities for the discussion of ideas, mainly of course such ideas as are expressed in literature.⁵⁰

His complaint was that ‘the literary feature seems to have been more or less retained but the teachers and the discussion are apparently omitted’. Clearly Orage was seeking another forum for debate but unfortunately the NUT ‘Literary Branch’ was not destined to be it. Was it seen as a forerunner of the Arts Club? Significantly, C. W. Whitmell an unusually popular school's inspector, in 1903 gave the same lecture to the Literary Branch as he gave a couple of years later to the Arts Club: ‘The Dypsichus of Clough’.

As the century drew to its close the 26-year old Orage had promoted a libertarian pedagogy more or less successfully for six years (an inspiration to A. S. Neil of Summerhill). He had held mass audiences on both socialist and theosophical platforms, had distinguished himself as a cultural critic in the Labour Leader and had edited a successful local socialist journal, Forward. A quotation copied into his notebook from Kipling revealed his feelings about that: ‘Any fool can write but it takes a god-given genius to be an editor’.⁵¹ Though he made it plain to his female colleagues he believed in free-love, he was probably married to Jean Watson and had settled in to an end-terrace house in Chapel Allerton, 36 Hawthorn Mount. His life was full of immensely promising fragments but no achievable synthesis. The means to this lay in his next chance encounter.

Notes

1. Most information on Orage's early life is from Philip Mairet, A. R. Orage A Memoir, Dent, London, 1936. Mairet heard it all from Orage himself, but it is not as accurate as could be desired. This is supplemented by John Carswell, Lives and Letters, Faber, London, 1978, which, while generally excellent, has also borrowed some of Mairet's inaccuracies.

2. Leeds School Board, Education Committee Minutes, October 1893, West Yorkshire Archives, Sheepscar, Leeds.

3. Leeds School Board, School Staff Ledgers, 1894, West Yorkshire Archives, Sheepscar, Leeds.

4. Quoted in M. A. Travis, ‘The Work of the Leeds School Board’ in Researches and Studies, The School of Education, University of Leeds, no. 8, May 1953.

5. A. R. Orage, ‘A Study in Mud’ in Albert T. Marles (ed.) Hypnotic Leeds, Leeds, 1894, p. 17.

6. Harehills Board School Log Book, Harehills Primary School, Newton Garth, Leeds, pp. 127, 145, 162.

7. Derek Linstrum, West Yorkshire Architects and Architecture, Lund Humphries, London, 1978, p. 260.

8. HMI's report, September 1894, Harehills Mixed Log Book, Harehills Primary School, p. 58.

9. Roundhay Road Board School Log Book, West Yorkshire Archives, Sheepscar, Leeds, pp. 447, 450, 452, 453, 455.

10. M. A. Travis, op. cit., pp. 92-93.

11. A. R. Orage, ‘Quixotic Energy’ in Hypnotic Leeds, p. 43.

12. Mary Gawthorpe, Up Hill to Holloway, Penobscot, Maine, 1962, p. 192.

13. Mairet, op. cit., p. 10.

14. Millie Price (née Browne), This World's Festival, unpublished autobiography in typescript, property of Agnes Patrick, 16 Bainbrigge Road, Leeds 6, p. 5.

15. Edward Carpenter, ‘A Memoir’ in Bessie Ford (ed.) Tom Maguire: A Remembrance, Labour Press Society, Manchester, 1895, p. x.

16. Ibid.

17. Edward Thompson, ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’ in A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds) Essays in Labour History, London, 1960, p. 279; and Tom Woodhouse, ‘The Working Class’ in Derek Fraser (ed.) A History of Modern Leeds, Manchester, 1980.

18. Alf Mattinson, Journals, vol. 1, p. 270, Leeds City Reference Library.

19. Peter d'A Jones, ‘The Christian Socialist Revival’ 1877-1914, Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 141-2. The letters are Engels to Sorge, 18 January 1893; Engels to Sorge, 18 March 1893 (K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Letters to Americans, 1848-1895’, New York, 1953, pp. 246-247, 249.

20. Alfred Orage in J. Clayton (ed.) Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party Some Plain Statements, Leeds, no date, p. 11.

21. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Country’ in Selected Essays, Penguin, London, 1950, p. 119. Lawrence could only have been eight years old when Orage, some seventy miles to the north, and twelve years his senior, started in post. But like Orage, he was part of that generation and social class swept into school teaching by the demands of the 1870 Education Act. Later he became an avid reader of the New Age and many of its opinions became his own.

22. Carswell, op. cit., p. 16.

23. Labour Leader, vol. VIII, no. 110, 4 May 1896, p. 155.

24. Millie Price, op. cit., pp. 83-84.

25. D. B. Foster, Socialism and the Christ, published by the author, Leeds, 1921, p. 31.

26. Leeds Citizen, 1.8.1919.

27. Labour Leader, 16 November 1895.

28. In a letter to Edward Carpenter, he refers to her as his ‘lover-comrade’ but John Carswell could find no trace of a marriage certificate in Somerset House. Nevertheless Orage was convinced he was married since he demanded a divorce from Jean in 1915, which as Roman Catholic she refused him. (Letter from Jean Orage to Holbrook Jackson dated 24 April 1915, Harry Ransome Center, University of Texas.)

29. Millie Price, op. cit., p. 86.

30. His story ‘The First Men’, a creation of myth, appeared in The Lotus Journal, August 1907, pp. 108-11 and ‘The Princesses and the Gardener’ in another issue.

31. Stanley Pierson, British Socialists: the journey from fantasy to politics, Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 193.

32. Emile Delavennay, Edward Carpenter and D. H. Lawrence: A Study in Edwardian Transition, Heinemann, London, 1969.

33. Edward Carpenter, letter to Walt Whitman, 12 July 1874, copy in Alf Mattinson Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

34. Alfred Orage, letter to Edward Carpenter, 3 February 1896, Carpenter Collection, Sheffield City Library.

35. Holbrook Jackson, ‘A. R. Orage: Personal Recollections’, The Windmill (Heinemann house journal), London, 1948, p. 44.

36. Alf Mattinson, ‘Journals’ 1925-28, vol 1, p. 293. Leeds City Reference Library.

37. Northern Federation of the Theosophical Society Minute Book 1893-1900, held at Harrogate TS Lodge, 6 Alexandra Road, Harrogate.

38. A list of lectures offered to federation lodges recorded in the minutes of September 1903.

39. Millie Price, op. cit., p. 113.

40. Leeds Mercury Weekly Supplement, 13 February and 5 March 1904, reports Orage lecturing on Myers's Human Personality and ‘Telepathy and Clairvoyance’, based on Myers, calling the theory of evolution ‘panaesthetic’.

41. Northern Federation TS Minute Book, 12-13 August 1905.

42. Millie Price, op. cit., p. 98.

43. Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, Routledge, Kegan Paul, London, 1972.

44. Beatrice Hastings, The Old ‘New Age’: Orage—and others, Blue Moon Press, London, 1936.

45. Quoted in James Webb, The Harmonious Circle, Thames and Hudson, London, 1980, p. 210.

46. ‘The Lamp of Thoth’, vol. III, no. 4 (undated), Leeds, pp. 33-35. Available from ‘The Sorcerer's Apprentice’, Hyde Park Corner, Leeds 6.

47. Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits, Spiritualism and English Plebeians 1850-1910, Routledge, Kegan Paul, London, 1986.

48. Leeds School Board, ‘Daily Notes’, notebook, ‘VI A’ handwritten on cover, no page numbers, in possession of Richard Orage.

49. Leeds Teacher's Journal, monthly journal of Leeds and District National Union of Teachers, January 1899, January 1900, January 1902 and January 1903, Brotherton Library, Leeds.

50. Letter dated 18 September 1902, in The Leeds Teacher's Journal, Oct/Nov 1902, p. 5, signed ‘A. R. Orage’.

51. Notebook entitled ‘Leeds School Board, Daily Notes, VI A’, undated but from internal evidence not before October 1896, p. 27, in the possession of Richard Orage.