The Free Age Press

Date: 2026-06-28

Context: A web-sourced, fact-checked overview of the Free Age Press (FAP) — Vladimir Chertkov’s English-language Tolstoy publishing operation (1900–c.1916). Unlike the corpus-dives, this is publishing history, not a theme in Tolstoy’s own texts: the evidence lives in scholarship (Holman, Alston), library catalogues, and the surviving FAP imprints, not in the local TEI/PDF corpus. The note answers five questions: what FAP was, what it translated, what the “Six Penny Series” was, what survives today, and who to contact. It folds in facts already cited across the shipped dives (Christian Teaching, Slavery of Our Times, Bethink Yourselves!, late-voice-encryption) and adds new web-verified detail.

Naming caution. Two presses, often conflated: the Free Age Press (English-language arm) and «Свободное слово» / Free Word (the Russian-language sister press). Both were Chertkov’s; this note is about the English one. The 1898 English imprints (e.g. The Christian Teaching, What Is Art?) were Brotherhood Publishing Co., not FAP — FAP was not founded until summer 1900.

1. Key findings

• Founded summer 1900, by Chertkov in English exile (he was ordered out of Russia in 1897 — a common error dates the press to 1897). FAP was the cheap-English arm of the Tolstoyan publishing network; the older Brotherhood Publishing Co. (from 1895, out of the Croydon Brotherhood Church) had carried Tolstoy’s earlier English work.
• Manager: Arthur C. Fifield (1900–1902), a Croydon Brotherhood Church member and joint editor with Chertkov. Chertkov recruited him for practical book-trade experience — at the James Bowden firm Fifield had marketed penny editions of Charles Sheldon’s novels (≈3 million copies in six months). The imprints named Maldon, Essex (then Christchurch), but those were colony addresses: Fifield actually worked from back bedrooms in his own homes (Catford, London; later Wick Cottage, Southbourne) and used outside printers — Morrison & Gibb of Edinburgh early on, then the silted-up Iford Lane waterworks at Tuckton once the colony settled there.
• The output figure checks out. From Fifield’s own 1933 account (23 typed pages, written at Chertkov’s request — Holman’s chief source): 43 separate publications, ~2,202 pages of text, 209,000 copies plus ~250,000 leaflets ≈ 424 million printed pages, over 1900–1902, run as a self-supporting non-profit. (Two popular write-ups render “424 million words” — that is a slip; the figure is pages.) Seed funding came from the Russian donor Alexander Konshin (£300, then £200); Fifield’s wage was £2 10s rising to £3 a week.
• “No Rights Reserved.” FAP printed uncopyrighted, deliberately cheap editions, consistent with Tolstoy’s renunciation of copyright on his post-1881 work — and actively invited free reproduction. The point was reach: Tolstoy praised it for putting his work before “English speaking working people,” and copies travelled as far as Shanghai and New York.
• Abroad-first, same-year. Because the texts were banned in Russia, FAP often printed the English the same year as composition, sometimes before any legal Russian text existed — e.g. The Slavery of Our Times (Maude, 1900) and Bethink Yourselves! (Tchertkoff, 1904).
• The “Six Penny Series” = the FAP “Sixpenny Pocket Series” — its 6d format for the longer treatises (e.g. What Then Must We Do?, The Kingdom of God Is Within You), sold alongside a graduated range of penny and twopenny pamphlets/leaflets for the short pieces. See §3 for the actual price list.
• What survives. The richest archive is the Leeds Russian Archive at the University of Leeds (the Tuckton House collection, LRA/MS 1381) — FAP records, the Sirnis papers, correspondence (Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Gorky, Lenin), photographs and glass plates. Michael Holman, the press’s historian, was a donor. FAP imprints also survive in the British Library, the Hoover Institution (Stanford), and as scans on archive.org and Wikisource.
• Best living contact: Charlotte Alston, Professor of History, Northumbria University — author of Tolstoy and his Disciples (2014), the standard account of the movement. See §5.

2. Texts translated and re-translated

FAP published Tolstoy’s later religious, ethical, and social writing — the censored “prophet-period” work — in cheap English editions. Representative titles (from the FAP list printed in A Great Iniquity, 1905, and the dives):

• The Slavery of Our Times (trans. Aylmer Maude, 1900)
• What Then Must We Do? / What Shall We Do?
• The Kingdom of God Is Within You
• Bethink Yourselves! (trans. V. Tchertkoff + “I.F.M.”, 1904)
• An Appeal to the Clergy of All Countries
• Thou Shalt Not Kill
• The Morals of Diet; or, The First Step
• An Appeal to Social Reformers
• The Overthrow of Hell and Its Restoration (a dramatic dialogue)
• A Great Iniquity (Великий грех / The Great Sin, 1905 — on the land question / Henry George’s single tax)

Translators and the authorization friction. Aylmer and Louise Maude were the major English translators of the period, but FAP positioned its texts as authorized, translated “from manuscript” under Chertkov’s control — and that produced a lasting friction with the Maudes, who criticized the “shoddiness” of some Tolstoyan-press translations and quotation-collections as not representing Tolstoy’s full meaning. Tolstoy’s copyright renunciation meant anyone could translate the post-1881 work; FAP’s claim to authority rested on Chertkov’s access to the manuscripts at Tuckton, not on copyright. (Note: Nabokov’s later low opinion of the Maude versions is a retrospective literary judgment, not part of the FAP-era dispute.)

3. The Six Penny Series — the actual price structure

From the FAP list printed in the front matter of A Great Iniquity (1905), English branch at 13 Paternoster Row, E.C. (London). FAP did not have one flat price — it had a tiered range, of which the “sixpenny” tier is one band:

So the “Six Penny Series” is the Sixpenny Pocket Series — FAP’s 6d line for the book-length works, distinct from the 1d–2d pamphlets and leaflets that carried the short polemics. The whole model was built on Fifield’s penny-edition experience: small format, cheap paper, no copyright, priced for working readers.

4. What remains today

Archives - Leeds Russian Archive, University of Leeds Library — Tuckton House collection, LRA/MS 1381 (≈11,193 ff; MS, TS, printed, photographs, glass plates; 1847–2015 spread). Contains FAP material, the Alexander Sirnis papers, and correspondence with Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Gorky, and Lenin. Michael Holman (the FAP historian) was a 2004 donor. Access via Leeds Special Collections (in-person Mon–Thu, by request; some material pending data-protection review). This is the prime first stop. - State Tolstoy Museum (ГМТ), Moscow — the Tolstoy manuscripts held in the purpose-built safe at Tuckton House went back to Russia in 1908 with Chertkov; the manuscript depository ultimately fed the 90-volume Jubilee Edition (the project the sold-off Tuckton estate helped fund). - British Library and Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford — surviving FAP imprints (per the dives’ bibliography).

Books - FAP editions survive in research libraries and as digitized scans on archive.org and Wikisource (e.g. A Great Iniquity; Tolstoy — Pamphlets, File:Tolstoy_-_Pamphlets.djvu on Wikimedia Commons). One genuine visuals gap noted in the late-voice dive: no «Свободное слово»/FAP masthead image exists on Commons — only the Pamphlets title page.

The site - Tuckton House itself: the Tolstoyan community there ran the press to c.1916 (with a single resident translator/editor after most of the colony left in 1908); the house remained occupied by associates until Ludvig Perno’s death in 1970. It is now best known locally for a second twist — Melita Norwood, later a long-serving Soviet agent, was the daughter of the FAP Latvian translator Alexander Sirnis; her parents met at Tuckton House. Local historian Ralph Clayton has written it up.

The rights - C. W. Daniel — a Tolstoyan publisher tied to FAP’s early popularity — went on to his own imprint (The Crank, The Open Road, The Tolstoyan). Sources disagree on the FAP handover: one dates his own venture to 1902 (on leaving FAP), another says he acquired FAP’s rights c.1906. Flagged below.

5. Who to contact

• Prof. Charlotte Alston — Professor of History, Northumbria University (Lipman Building, City Campus, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST). Author of Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (I.B. Tauris, 2014). The standard living authority on the English/international Tolstoyan movement, FAP included. Best single contact.
• Dr Michael J. de K. Holman — Leeds (emeritus). Author of the definitive article (below); donated FAP-related material to the Leeds Russian Archive. May be retired.
• University of Leeds, Special Collections / Leeds Russian Archive — archivists for LRA/MS 1381; the route to the primary documents.
• The Tolstoy Society (UK) — society and journal; a route to current researchers (contact not captured here — worth a direct look).
• Ralph Clayton — local historian, for the Tuckton House building and its post-Tolstoyan history.

6. The key books, annotated

• Michael J. de K. Holman, “Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English Manager Arthur Fifield,” The Slavonic and East European Review 66/2 (1988), pp. 184–197. The single best source on FAP itself — the operational record, built directly on Fifield’s 1933 memoir. The print-run figures, the Konshin funding, the outside-printer arrangement, and the Fifield–Chertkov working relationship in this note all trace back here. An article, not a book, but the anchor.

• Charlotte Alston, Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). The first study to treat Tolstoyism as one international movement rather than a set of national curiosities — the communities, the publishing houses (FAP among them), and the links between them across England, the US, the Netherlands, Hungary, and beyond. Its sharp observation: the creed made more sense inside authoritarian Russia, where refusing to cooperate with the state was the only honest stance, than in England and America, where followers already had the political freedoms Tolstoy told them not to use. The standard movement-level history.

• Alexandre J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought: Christian Anarcho-Pacifist Iconoclasm Then and Now (Routledge, 2011; paperback 2020). Not about FAP — about the ideas FAP printed. A systematic reconstruction of Tolstoy’s late political thought as a coherent Christian anarcho-pacifism (the Sermon on the Mount read as a literal political programme: no violence, no state, no oaths, no courts), followed by the “now” half — its bearing on present-day pacifism, anarchism, and protest. The book that takes Tolstoy’s politics seriously as a system rather than an eccentricity. (It is also, fairly, one of the works that fastens the label “Christian anarchism” onto Tolstoy — a term he accepted only as a religious substance and rejected as a political badge. Read it knowing Tolstoy resisted the very category.)

• Alexandra Popoff, Tolstoy’s False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov (Pegasus, 2014). The hostile case against the man who ran FAP. Popoff casts Chertkov as a Machiavellian manipulator who took editorial control of Tolstoy’s work, isolated him from his family, and engineered the contested 1910 will. Relevant here because Chertkov is FAP — but it is a strongly argued frame, not a neutral account: it reads the primary record (Tolstoy repeatedly affirming Chertkov’s role as his own settled wish) against the grain. Worth reading as the prosecution, with the defence — Tolstoy’s own words — kept open beside it.

(Web resource: “Publishing Enterprises,” Followers of Tolstoy — Brotherhood Publishing Co. (1895) vs Free Age Press (1900) division of labour. Anonymous but well-sourced.)

7. Needs verification / open questions

• C. W. Daniel and the FAP rights: 1902 (own imprint on leaving) vs c.1906 (acquired FAP’s rights) — sources conflict; Holman/Alston should settle it.
• “424 million” — confirm pages not words (the dives and the primary Fifield figure say pages; two blogs say words).
• End date of FAP: “press continued to c.1916” vs “house occupied to 1970” describe different things (the press vs the residence) — keep them separate.
• The Maldon → Purleigh → Christchurch/Tuckton “trajectory” is the colony/imprint story; Fifield’s actual workplaces were his own homes near London and Bournemouth. Don’t collapse the two.
• Tuckton manuscripts → ГМТ Moscow: the return to Russia in 1908 is well documented; the precise present-day holding institution for specific FAP-era manuscripts is asserted from general knowledge here and should be confirmed against a GMT/PSS source before citing on the site.
• Tolstoy Society (UK) current contact details not captured.

Sources

• Vladimir Chertkov — Wikipedia
• Tuckton — Wikipedia
• The Free Age Press — War and Peace blog
• Arthur Fifield and Chertkov: The Free Age Press — Peasant Arts blog
• Publishing Enterprises — Followers of Tolstoy (WordPress)
• Vladimir Chertkov — Followers of Tolstoy (WordPress)
• Tuckton House / Melita Norwood — Ralph Clayton
• Tuckton House (LRA/MS 1381) — University of Leeds Special Collections
• Professor Charlotte Alston — Northumbria University
• Tolstoy and his Disciples — Charlotte Alston (Google Books)
• [Holman, “Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press,” SEER 66/2 (1988)] — full text behind JSTOR/SEER; citation via Northumbria and Leeds records.
• A Great Iniquity, p.10 — FAP price list (Wikisource)