Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Things You May Not Know

Abbott answered his first critic in character, from prison. When The Athenaeum objected in November 1884 that lines which can be seen must have some thickness, Abbott sent the paper a letter signed A Square and dated “Flatland, the State Prison, Nov. 28, 1884”. He granted the critic’s facts, denied his conclusions, and supposed that so learned a reviewer must be a Cube. The editors replied that all the Flatlanders needed was “a delicate micrometer”, and that their reviewer could claim to be no more than “a rectangular parallelepiped”, a mere box. Within a few weeks the letter had become the first half of the Preface to the second edition, micrometer and all.

The Spectator reviewed Flatland in the issue that announced the Reform compromise. On 29 November 1884 the same number of The Spectator that reported that “the negotiations on the Redistribution Bill have come to a successful end” carried its long review of Flatland. Readers met the Colour Bill and its false concession in the very week their own quarrel over the franchise ended in a real one.

In 1887 a science monthly turned away a letter from Flatland. In its issue of 1 March 1887 Knowledge, Richard Proctor’s popular-science magazine, a monthly since 1885, turned down a correspondent’s “wail from Flatland”. “We would publish this piteous lamentation,” it explained, “were more of our readers quadri-dimensional.” Little more than two years after it appeared, the book was a joke that scientific readers could still expect one another to share.

Flatland has no special word for the four-dimensional cube. Abbott’s Preface calls such figures Extra-Cubes, and in § 20 the Sphere teaches the Square to build Extra-Solids, but in § 19 the Square has no name for the figure of sixteen corners he deduces, only “a still more divine Organization”. The word tesseract first appears in print four years later, in Charles Hinton’s A New Era of Thought (1888), spelt tessaract. Abbott managed with a compound.

The New York Times hated the book and loved the brother. Its reviewer of February 1885, who thought the whole thing delirious, quoted the brother’s flat refusal to believe in the Sphere and added, “May we remark that we love that brother?” Had the brother existed outside the story, he said, he would have gone many miles to shake his hand.

The first book to borrow from Flatland filled four chapters with it. In 1888 the physician A. T. Schofield published Another World; or, The Fourth Dimension, and Nature, reviewing it, remarked that its first four chapters “consist of large extracts from ‘Flatland’”, and that it would never have been written had Abbott’s book not appeared.

The voice of the Point comes from a very new machine. When the Point of Pointland tinkles “as from one of your Spaceland phonographs” (§ 20), Abbott was reaching for an invention not yet seven years old, for Thomas Edison applied for his patent on 24 December 1877 and received it in February 1878.

The probable dedicatee taught beside the other prophet of the fourth dimension. The H. C. of the Dedication was most probably Howard Candler, Abbott’s schoolfellow and friend of more than sixty years, who was mathematics master at Uppingham. Charles Hinton, whose essays on the fourth dimension began in 1880, taught at Uppingham from 1880 to 1886, but no surviving document shows that either man passed ideas to Abbott, or that the two schoolmasters ever discussed them. The coincidence remains.