Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Introduction

Before a word of the story, Abbott sets out a dedication in the manner of an inscription, a phrase to a line and, but for the points of H. C., not a stop from top to bottom. The work is offered to the inhabitants of “Space in General”, and to one friend, H. C., in particular, by “a Humble Native of Flatland”. Its writer explains that he was “Initiated into the Mysteries” of three dimensions after knowing only two, and he hopes that his readers, the citizens of that higher region, may aspire in their turn to the secrets of four, five or even six. The purpose he names is not knowledge but character. A mathematical romance declares its aim to be two virtues, the enlargement of the imagination and the growth of modesty, and it offers them, with a bow, to the superior race that is its reader.

The bow is the book’s first joke, and its most serious one. Dedications of the period flattered a patron who stood above the author; this one flatters every reader at once, as a member of the “Superior Races” of “Solid Humanity”, and then asks for the one virtue that flattery discourages. Solid is a pun, meaning three-dimensional and also weighty, respectable and slow to imagine anything new, and Superior Races borrows the language in which Victorian England ranked the peoples of its empire. The request is humble in its form and bold in its substance. It asks readers who are used to looking down on others to imagine more than they can see, and to doubt that what they see is all there is.

Imagination and modesty pull in opposite directions, and the book needs both. Imagination without modesty becomes the confidence that one’s own picture of the world is the world, and modesty without imagination becomes the shrug that will not think beyond experience. The Dedication’s language of initiation, borrowed from the Greek mysteries that Plato made a figure for philosophy, promises something to be seen rather than merely taught, and from the first page the reader is cast as the one who sees. The flat world lies open below. What that position is worth, and whether the reader who holds it will show the modesty the Dedication asks for, is a question the book leaves open until its last page.

The Author

Edwin Abbott Abbott was born on 20 December 1838 in Marylebone, the eldest son of Edwin Abbott, who had been made headmaster of the Philological School there at the age of nineteen and who later compiled a concordance to the works of Pope. His parents were first cousins who shared a surname, and the boy was given his mother’s maiden name, which was also his own, as a middle name. He published as Edwin A. Abbott. A schoolmaster’s son, he became one of the most admired headmasters of his generation, and Flatland is a schoolmaster’s book from its first page to its last.

He was sent to the City of London School, left it as captain in 1857 with a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, and in 1861 was Senior Classic, first of his year in the classical examinations, with the Chancellor’s Medal as well. His college elected him a Fellow in 1862, the year he was ordained deacon, and in 1863, the year he was made priest, he married Mary Rangeley and gave up his fellowship. They had a son and a daughter, and the daughter later served as his secretary. After short spells as an assistant master at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and at Clifton College, he was chosen in 1865, at twenty-six, to be headmaster of the school where he had been a boy.

He held the post for twenty-four years. In that time 153 of his boys won open scholarships at Oxford or Cambridge, and he changed what they learned. He made elementary chemistry compulsory in the upper school, put English literature into the teaching of every form, had the Sixth read a play of Shakespeare beside a Greek play, and taught comparative philology, with Sanskrit for the keenest. His pupils included H. H. Asquith, the future Prime Minister, who remembered him as “the driving power of the whole machine”. For a time he belonged to the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching, and his Hints on Home Teaching (1883), a guide for parents issued by the firm that would publish Flatland, has a section on how to teach geometry to children.

Words were his first subject, and they are the key to his satire. He wrote A Shakespearian Grammar, a study of the English of Shakespeare’s day, and with his schoolfellow J. R. Seeley he wrote English Lessons for English People (1871); How to Write Clearly followed in 1872. A man who could explain the grammar of Elizabethan English to a class of boys knew how the ordinary words of a language carry the assumptions of those who speak it. Flatland is built on that knowledge. Its people give themselves away every time they speak of rank, regularity or feeling.