History Of The New Age Magazine

You might have heard of the term New Age. New Age music, literature, philosophy, or religion.

Some of the elements in the New Age movement appear under the practices of other movements such as spiritualism, theosophy, or some forms of New Thought, which date back to the nineteenth century. In turn, these movements began from transcendentalism, mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, and other esoteric or occult traditions from the West such as Hermetic astrology, magic, alchemy, astrology, and cabbala.

However, what made the New Age popular in the modern age was largely in part by the publication of The New Age magazine.

The New Age magazine was a British literary magazine. It was originally a weekly publication of the Christian Socialist movement that discusses about Christian liberalism and socialism in 1894.

In 1907, The New Age magazine found a set of new owners Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson who ran Leed Arts Club. The two men bought the journal with George Bernard Shaw lending financial assistance. Jackson co-edited during the first year. After Jackson, Orage edited the magazine until he finally sold it in 1922.

By that time, The New Age magazine became less focused in literature and art. Instead, it started to mainly focus on mysticism and other spiritual topics. As what the Brown University said in a comment, “The New Age magazine helped shape modernism in literature and the arts from 1907 to 1922.”

Orage and Jackson reoriented the contents of the magazine to promote the ideas of Nietzsche, Fabian socialism and later a form of Guild socialism. The magazine became somewhat of a forum, containing pro and opposing viewpoints and arguments.

The New Age magazine was published weekly and has a wide cross-section of writers who are interested with not only literature and arts, but also in politics, economics, and spiritualism. The magazine was also famous for being one of the first publications in England where Sigmund Freud’s ideas were discussed before World War I, written by Maurice Eder, a British psychoanalyst.

The magazine was also famous for the definition and development of modernism in visual arts, literature, and music. This modernism was regularly observed, reviewed, and contributed to the New Age movement’s activities.
During its publication, The New Age magazine had a lot of contributors. Some of the most notable ones are Michael Arlen, Hilaire Belloc, Cecil Chesterton, Edwin Burr, Oscar Levy, H. G. Wells, Clifford Sharp, Herbert Read, and Walter Sickert.

Unfortunately, as the focus shifted, the quality and circulation of the magazine declined.