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...