At a Glance

A Square, a lawyer and amateur geometer who lives on a flat plane, describes his two-dimensional country for readers who live in Space, and then tells how he came to know worlds of other dimensions. Edwin A. Abbott’s short romance of 1884 is a lesson in geometry, a satire on Victorian England and a parable about the limits of what any creature can perceive, all at once.

Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published 1884; revised second edition 1884; 22 sections in two parts; about 33,000 words; ten figures by the author.

The book. Flatland is a vast plane, like a sheet of paper, on which living figures move about without the power of rising above it or sinking below it, and see one another only as straight lines. Its narrator, who signs himself A Square, writes Part I, This World, as a sober treatise on his country. He describes its climate and houses, its classes and laws, its Women, its schools, its history and its priests, in a society where a man’s rank is fixed by the number of his sides. Part II, Other Worlds, turns from description to narrative, and to the worlds of other dimensions that the narrator came to know. The manner is deadpan throughout. Abbott makes his jokes with a straight face and a ruler, and the satire on class, women, schooling and the Church lands, again and again, in the reader’s own England.

The author. Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838–1926) was headmaster of the City of London School for twenty-four years, a classical scholar, a student of Shakespeare’s English and a liberal clergyman who wrote many books of theology. He published Flatland under his narrator’s name. His own appeared on its title page only in 1926, the year of his death.

The reader. The book asks for no more mathematics than a school course in plane geometry, and the notes supply whatever else it takes for granted, from Victorian slang to the angles of a pentagon. It can be read in an evening. It repays a slower pace, however, since its second half depends on the patient descriptions of the first. A reader of Plato will meet, on the first page, creatures who live like shadows and take their plane for the whole of the world; a reader of the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson will find a book about the widening of the mind.

The edition. The text is the revised second edition of 1884, restored to its 1884 readings wherever the modern transcription behind it had followed a later printing, and its two hundred and more notes never look ahead in the story. They explain words, allusions, geometry and satire. The Preface “By the Editor” was written after the first edition appeared, and it alludes to events later in the story. A reader who wants no hints may keep it until the end. Everything printed after the text, the Afterword, the Chapter Outline and the rest of the back matter, gives the story away and is best left until the book is finished. Read the story first.