Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Name: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Author: Edwin A. Abbott

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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

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Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions With Illustrations by the Author, A Square

“Fie, fie, how franticly I square my talk!”

New and Revised Edition

1.Source editor’s annotationThe pseudonym of Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838–1926), whose parents were first cousins of the same surname, so that his middle name repeats his last. The double initial, A × A or A², is usually taken as the source of “A Square”; the narrator is a Square by class (§ 3), and the figures are presented as his own drawings. Abbott was Senior Classic at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1861, a clergyman of the Church of England of liberal, Broad Church views, and from 1865 to 1889 headmaster of the City of London School, where he had been a pupil. He wrote a Shakespearian Grammar, books on English and many works of theology. The secret was soon guessed. On 22 November 1884 the Athenaeum reported the book to be “the production of the head master of a well-known school”, but his name first appeared on its title page only in 1926, the year of his death.

2.Source editor’s annotationShakespeare, Titus Andronicus III.ii (Folger 3.2.31). Titus, who has lost a hand, as his daughter Lavinia has lost both hers, checks himself for harping on hands, “As if we should forget we had no hands”. To square one’s talk is to shape or frame it, and franticly means madly. Abbott ends the line with an exclamation and turns the verb into a pun on his narrator. The scene, of a man who cannot stop speaking of what he lacks, suits a book about a missing dimension.

3.Source editor’s annotationThe second edition, published by Seeley & Co. in December 1884, about six weeks after the first, which had come out at the end of October as a small quarto at half a crown. It added the Editor’s Preface, inserted two passages in the dialogues of Part II (§ 16 and § 19) to answer a reviewer, and corrected a few slips. The first edition’s wrapper bore another Shakespearean motto, Horatio’s “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!”, to which Hamlet answers, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome” (Hamlet I.v, Folger 1.5.185–186).

About This Reading Edition

Edwin A. Abbott’s mathematical romance of a Square in a two-dimensional world, in the revised text of 1884, with an introduction, full notes and a chapter outline.

Historical Text

Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published by Seeley and Co., London, in 1884 under the pseudonym A Square. This supplied annotated edition follows the revised second edition of 1884, established from a modern transcription collated against that printing.

About This Edition

Revised second edition, Seeley and Co., London, 1884; supplied annotated Diotimos edition, 2026

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

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