Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

He was a clergyman too, and most of his books are theology. Abbott belonged to the Broad Church, the liberal wing of the Church of England, which read the Bible with the tools of historical criticism and looked for the spirit beneath the letter. He gave the Hulsean Lectures, a Cambridge series in theology, in 1876, and in 1877 he published Through Nature to Christ and was a Select Preacher, one of the University preachers, at Oxford. His sermons troubled some who heard them. The Modern Churchman, in a tribute after his death, judged that his attack on the miracles of the Bible and the Church had all but ended his clerical career in the 1880s, and described his faith as belief in “a non-miraculous supernatural Christ”. Twice before Flatland he had written fiction in a borrowed voice, in Philochristus (1878) and Onesimus (1882), anonymous memoirs of imagined disciples of Christ and of St Paul. Flatland is a third memoir of that kind, an initiate’s own account of his world, set this time in the country of plane geometry.

He also worked for the education of women when it was still a contested cause. As chairman of the Teachers’ Training and Registration Society he urged Cambridge in 1877 to examine and certify women teachers, and in 1878 the Society opened a training college for women.

He retired to Hampstead in 1889, at fifty, to give the rest of his life to theology, a direction that The Kernel and the Husk (1886), letters on a spiritual Christianity published without his name, had already shown. The quarrel with miracles went on. Philomythus (1891) answered Cardinal Newman’s essay on ecclesiastical miracles, and The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman (1892) carried the argument into Newman’s own life. The Spirit on the Waters (1897) followed, and then the many volumes of Diatessarica (1900–1917), a minute study of the language of the Gospels, in which the grammarian served the divine. Honours came late, from St John’s, which made him an Honorary Fellow in 1912, and from the British Academy, which elected him a Fellow in 1913. He spent his last seven years and more in bed, and died of influenza at his house in Well Walk, Hampstead, on 12 October 1926, aged eighty-seven; the obituary in The Times praised the headmaster and the scholar and did not mention Flatland.

The silence is understandable, and it is also a mistake. The little book joins the three men Abbott was, and each of them speaks on almost every page. The teacher knew how hard it is to make a pupil see a figure that cannot be drawn on the board. The grammarian heard the prejudice in a common word. The liberal divine held that belief must reach beyond what the senses can show, and that the imagination is one of its instruments.

The Book and Its Making

No letter, memoir or preface of Abbott’s tells when or why he wrote Flatland. The likeliest witness would have been Howard Candler, the mathematics master at Uppingham who is generally taken to be the H. C. of the Dedication, and with whom Abbott exchanged letters every week; the letters are lost. The book itself supplies one date. A footnote of Abbott’s own in § 4 cites the Spectator of 27 September 1884, and since it stands already in the first edition, he was still putting in the last touches, at least in proof, in the weeks before publication.

The publisher was the firm of Seeley in Essex Street, Strand, which had issued Abbott’s books for schools and for parents. The book came out in the last days of October as a small quarto at half a crown, two shillings and sixpence, and the Spectator listed it among the publications of the week on 1 November. The title page named no author. It offered a romance “With Illustrations by the Author, A Square”, and set beneath the title a line from Titus Andronicus in which the verb square makes a pun on the narrator’s shape. The pseudonym itself was a second pun, from a man who was Abbott twice over, A times A, and so A squared.

The disguise did not last. Within a month, on 22 November, the Athenaeum passed on a report that the book was the work of the headmaster of a well-known school. By March 1885 the Boston Literary World had named him, citing the Spectator. The reviews, which began in the first week of November, were mostly friendly and sometimes puzzled, and the Athenaeum’s critic, unsure what the book was meant to do, also pressed an objection in geometry that went to the heart of its premise. Abbott took that critic seriously enough to answer in character, in a letter signed A Square that the Athenaeum printed on 6 December.