Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

By then a second printing was needed. In December 1884 Seeley issued a new and revised edition, for which Abbott wrote a Preface in the voice of an Editor, a Spacelander who speaks on the narrator’s behalf. The Editor thanks the readers whose appreciation had, “with unexpected celerity”, required a second edition, and then answers, in the narrator’s name, the two chief objections of the reviewers. The Note on the Text describes the rest.

For some years Abbott kept up the fiction. In The Kernel and the Husk (1886) he recommended Flatland to his correspondent as a little book lately published, as if it were another man’s. In 1897 he let the mask fall. The title page of The Spirit on the Waters listed Flatland among its author’s works, and a footnote there owned that he had worked out the same idea in a little book of 1884. In his Apologia (1907) he cited the Preface of the second edition to explain that its phrase “lies beyond experience” had referred to the ultimate cause of things, not to alleged facts of history. By then the book was out of print.

The first printing to carry his name on its title page came from Basil Blackwell of Oxford in 1926, a few months before his death. It was called the third edition, revised, and it carried an introduction by William Garnett, his old pupil, who had been the first demonstrator in physics at the Cavendish Laboratory and who now read the book in the light of relativity. For all its later fame, the text of Flatland was settled in a few busy weeks at the end of 1884, as the Note on the Text explains. No later revision can be shown to be his.

Its World

Flatland is a satire with an address, and most of its jokes, aimed at particular institutions of the England of 1884, would have been recognised at once by a reader of the weekly reviews that autumn. Two conversations of the day meet in it. One was social, about who should count in the life of the nation, and the other mathematical, about what might exist beyond the reach of the senses, and the book’s originality lies in making each a figure for the other. Blindness to those below becomes a picture of blindness to what lies above.

The book appeared in the year of the Third Reform Act, when through the summer and autumn the country argued over a bill to give the vote to the labourers of the counties. The House of Lords threw it out in July and let it pass only after the party leaders struck a bargain in November, and an attempt to include women had been voted down in June. Part I’s history of an agitation to have “all individuals and all classes” recognised as equal, and of a governing order wavering before it, was published into the middle of that quarrel. The notes give the dates and the votes. What matters here is that the first readers met Flatland’s politics while their own were unsettled.

Flatland’s social order rests on a law of nature by which “a male child shall have one more side than his father” (§ 3), so that rank is inherited, measured and, with luck, improved by breeding. Victorian science had supplied the language. The scientist Francis Galton had argued in Hereditary Genius (1869) that ability runs in families, and in 1883 he coined the word eugenics for the improvement of human stock; the philosopher Herbert Spencer’s phrase the survival of the fittest dated from 1864. The phrenologists, whose handbook, George Combe’s The Constitution of Man (1828), sold some 350,000 copies in the century, taught that the shape of the skull revealed the mind within it. Abbott takes all these metaphors at their word. In Flatland a man’s shape is his class, his character and his prospects, and the narrator finds the arrangement admirable.

The pages on Women belong to a decade in which the position of women was changing fast, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 had at last let a wife hold property in her own name. Girton and Newnham, the first colleges for women at Cambridge, date from 1869 and 1871, and since 1881 women had been allowed to sit the University’s honours examinations, though not to take its degrees. The philosopher John Stuart Mill had argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) that “what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing”. Flatland’s Female Code, with its laws of entry and movement, its apartments built to confine and its narrator’s confident account of what women are by nature, shows that artificial nature in the making.