Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Note on the Text

This edition prints the revised second edition of Flatland, published by Seeley & Co., London, in December 1884. Its title page reads “New and Revised Edition”, and it opens with a Preface to the Second and Revised Edition, spoken by the Editor, which the first edition, published some six weeks earlier, did not have. It is the text as Abbott himself revised it, within weeks of first publication and in answer to his first readers. No later printing has a better claim.

The changes were few and deliberate. Besides the Preface and its author’s note, the second edition inserted two passages in Part II, in § 16 and § 19, to answer the Athenaeum’s reviewer, who had argued that a line which can be seen must have some thickness. The author’s note to the Preface points to them by the page numbers of 1884, and each is marked in this edition by a note at its start. It also corrected Dodecahedron, a solid, to Dodecagon, a plane figure of twelve sides, in § 10 and § 12, and in Abbott’s note to § 15 it put right a slip that Nature’s reviewer had noticed, Flatland for Spaceland.

The text has been established from a modern transcription, that of Standard Ebooks, which descends from the Project Gutenberg text of 1995 and had been checked against a copy of the 1884 second edition. The editorial modernisations of that transcription in capitals, spelling and hyphenation were first undone. The whole text was then collated word for word against the 1884 printing, and the collation showed that the transcription had been made, at least in part, from a later printing, since one of its readings agrees with the revised third edition of 1926. Some sixty readings of wording and some fifty of capitals have accordingly been restored to the text of 1884. So have some forty marks of punctuation, chiefly commas and the comma that Abbott set before a dash. In § 11, for instance, the narrator’s list of matters he has no time to explain includes “our eyes, adapted to our linear sides”, where the later text gave only our Alphabet and method of writing, adapted to our linear tablets. In § 12 the Circles carry out their policy “Consistently”, not Constantly, and in § 13 the lovers of Lineland are united “before they are aware”, not before they are awake. Small as they are, such readings are Abbott’s. The Preface’s own references to the pages of 1884, see page 81 in the text and on pp. 70 and 88 in the author’s note, had been dropped or altered; both are restored, and the notes give the sections to which they point.

This edition has made few changes of its own. The section headings keep their 1884 form, as in “§ 1.—Of the Nature of Flatland”, and follow the text rather than the list of contents where the two differ, in § 7 and § 14. The Dedication keeps its small capitals. One misprint has been emended, If for the 1884 It in § 6, and it is listed in the Textual Notes at the back. Two readings of 1884 that look wrong are kept and explained in footnotes, “an Isosceles” in § 3, where later printings read an Equilateral, and a numeral in § 15. In wording, spelling and capitals the text follows the 1884 printing, and in punctuation it follows that printing wherever the 1884 reading is certain. Elsewhere the modern transcription’s punctuation stands.

Abbott’s spelling is kept as the 1884 printing has it. He mixes -ise and -ize, writing recognise beside recognize and civilised beside civilization, and he has shew and shewed once each beside show elsewhere, as well as æsthetic and enquire. They are a careful writer’s habits, not errors.

The ten figures are Abbott’s own, offered on the title page as the narrator’s work, and they are reproduced here from modern redrawings of the 1884 cuts, with their hand-lettered labels. Abbott’s four notes, to the Preface, § 3, § 4 and § 15, stand at the foot of the page among the editor’s and are marked Author’s note., with their reference marks where the 1884 printing sets them. The editor’s notes, more than two hundred of them, gloss Abbott’s words and allusions, work through his geometry and identify the Victorian targets of his satire. They also give the sources of his borrowings from Scripture, Plato and Shakespeare and record the passages added in 1884 and the readings kept, and each says only what the text has said up to the point where it stands. The Notes on Sources at the back explain their references.