SOURCE: Gibbons, Tom H. “Art For Evolution's Sake: Alfred Orage.” In Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880-1920, pp. 98-126. Nedlands, Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1973.

In the following essay, Gibbons charts Orage's flirtations with many radical movements of the early twentieth century: from socialism, vorticism and Fabianism to his ultimate alignment with G. I. Gurdjieff's brand of mysticism.

Alfred James Orage, familiarly known as Alfred Richard Orage, was born on 22 January 1873, at Dacre in Yorkshire. When his father died soon afterwards, the widow and her four children returned to Fenstanton, the village in Huntingdonshire from which the family originated. The family was so poor that Orage could not have continued to attend the village school without the help of the local squire, who also helped him to attend a teachers training college at Abingdon, near Oxford, during 1892 and part of...