Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

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

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Dedication

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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

p. 13

Dedication

To The Inhabitants of Space in General And H. C. in Particular This Work is Dedicated By a Humble Native of Flatland In the Hope that Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries Of Three Dimensions Having been previously conversant With Only Two So the Citizens of that Celestial Region May aspire yet higher and higher To the Secrets of Four Five or even Six Dimensions Thereby contributing To the Enlargement of the Imagination And the possible Development Of that most rare and excellent Gift of Modesty Among the Superior Races Of Solid Humanity

4.Source editor’s annotationGenerally identified as Howard Candler (d. 1916), Abbott’s schoolfellow at the City of London School, who went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1856, was Sixteenth Wrangler in 1860, and from 1861 taught mathematics at Uppingham School. The Cambridge alumni register calls him “a life-long friend” of Abbott, and for years he read the proofs of Abbott’s theological books; in 1917, after his death, Abbott remembered a friend “of more than sixty years’ standing”. The book itself never names him. By a coincidence of place, Charles Howard Hinton, an English writer on the fourth dimension, taught at Uppingham from 1880 to 1886, while Candler was mathematics master there; no evidence connects either man with the writing of Flatland.

5.Source editor’s annotationThe language of the Greek mystery cults, above all the Mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis, whose rites were shown rather than taught and might not be told; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter calls blessed “he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries”. Initiation came in grades, the lesser mysteries before the greater, which is the shape of the Dedication’s hope that, as the writer passed from two dimensions to three, his readers may rise to four, five or six. Plato made the rite a figure for philosophy. Diotima leads Socrates from “the lesser mysteries of love” to the greater and more hidden ones (Symposium 209e–210a). A clergyman would hear also St Paul’s warning that to understand all mysteries without charity is nothing (1 Corinthians 13:2). The figure returns in § 11.

6.Source editor’s annotationGeometry of more than three dimensions was established mathematics by 1884. Arthur Cayley, addressing the British Association in September 1883, imagined “rational beings living in a one-dimensional space (a line)” or on a surface, to whom the next dimension would be as inconceivable as a fourth is to beings of three, and added that “granting a fourth dimension we may assume as many more dimensions as we please”. Nothing shows that Abbott read the address, but it shows what an educated reader of 1884 could know (see also the note to the Preface on the fourth dimension).

7.Source editor’s annotationAn echo of the Book of Common Prayer, whose Collect for Quinquagesima Sunday asks God to pour into our hearts “that most excellent gift of charity”; the Epistle for that Sunday is St Paul’s hymn to charity (1 Corinthians 13). Abbott sets modesty where the Prayer Book has charity, and the lesson is his own. In The Spirit on the Waters (1897), recalling the illustration from dimensions he had worked out in Flatland, he hopes that such speculation may “develop in us modesty, respect for facts”.

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

Dedication

About This Reading Edition

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