Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

For the next half-century the book’s keepers were mathematicians and popularisers, and they prized it as a story and a lesson in dimensions more than as a satire. Banesh Hoffmann, Einstein’s collaborator, introduced the Dover paperback of 1952 as a story first, observing that “Flat they may be physically, but their characters are well rounded”. Martin Gardner, in his column of mathematical games in Scientific American in 1980, treated it as the founder of its kind but regretted how little it says of Flatland’s physical laws. The satire suffered for it. A. K. Dewdney, who went on to supply those laws, observed that in the second half “the satirical possibilities shrink in face of the challenge of the third dimension”, and later admirers praised the journey more than the mockery. Rucker took the Square’s ascent for a picture of mystical experience, and Banchoff, whose archive at Brown University gathered the book’s history, called it “his nearly flawless introduction to the method of analogy”.

Academic criticism began in earnest with the Victorianist Rosemary Jann’s essay of 1985 in Victorian Studies, which, as its title announces, read the book through Abbott’s “Natural Christianity” and his view of the scientific imagination. The historian of Victorian science Jonathan Smith, with Lawrence Berkove and Gerald Baker, answered in the same journal in 1996 with an essay that sets the book beside Abbott’s quarrel with Newman over the theology of probability.

Others have set it in its age. The Victorianist Andrea Henderson linked it with the aesthetic movement and its delight in pure form (2009). The literary scholar Elizabeth Throesch argued that “Flatland is most accurately situated outside of hyperspace philosophy”, because Abbott was “satirizing contemporary English culture” rather than popularising the fourth dimension (2017). For Bruce Clarke, a scholar of literature and science, “Abbott’s satire is culturally tame in comparison with Hinton’s uncanny leaps and dives.” The literary historian Mark Blacklock called it “the first English-language higher spatial fiction” (2018), and Jayne Hildebrand has argued that it refuses its reader the all-seeing view of character that novels usually grant, “a posture that invites a dangerous epistemological complacency” (2024).

The question of the women has never been closed. Most introducers have read § 4 as satire, and Banchoff pointed out that Abbott “was quite closely connected to women’s educational issues”. Karen Feiden, introducing an edition of 1982, called Abbott a subtle satirist but admitted that “we don’t always know when he is poking fun”, and Isaac Asimov, the next year, suspected that “the author himself may have participated in those now antiquated social views”.

Blacklock’s description of the book’s legacy as “multidimensional, multivalent, and mobile” fits its reception as a whole. It has been read as a primer, a satire, a parable, a prophecy of relativity and a founding text of science fiction, and each reading has found something in it that the others missed.