Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Further Reading

Six editions stand out among the many. The two oldest, Basil Blackwell’s reissue of 1926 with William Garnett’s introduction and the Dover paperback of 1952 with Banesh Hoffmann’s, are discussed under Critical Reception. Ian Stewart’s The Annotated Flatland (2002) is a mathematician’s commentary. Rosemary Jann’s edition in Oxford World’s Classics (2006) comes from a scholar who has written on Abbott’s theology. William Lindgren and Thomas Banchoff’s Cambridge edition (2009) adds full notes and commentary, a survey of the book’s critical reception, and the Preface moved to the end as an epilogue. Lila Marz Harper’s Broadview edition (2009) reprints the reviews of 1884 and 1885 together with companion texts from Plato, Helmholtz, Hinton and Schofield. Banchoff’s online archive at Brown University holds transcriptions of nearly all the early reviews, many later introductions, and Abbott’s letters and tributes. It is the first place to look.

For Abbott’s life the short account in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, by L. R. Farnell revised by Rosemary Jann, is the place to begin. His theology is best read in his own books, Through Nature to Christ (1877), The Kernel and the Husk (1886), Philomythus (1891) and The Spirit on the Waters (1897). The second and fourth return to Flatland. Of the critics discussed under Critical Reception, the essays of Jann (1985) and of Smith, Berkove and Baker (1996), both in Victorian Studies, are the place to start on Abbott’s theology. For the history of higher space the books to read are Throesch’s Before Einstein (2017), freely available online, and Blacklock’s The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension (2018). Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983; revised 2013) follows the idea from Abbott’s time into Cubism and beyond.

The companion books begin with Charles Hinton’s Scientific Romances (1886) and An Episode of Flatland (1907). A. K. Dewdney’s The Planiverse (1984) builds the physics Abbott left out, and Dionys Burger’s Sphereland (English 1965) and Ian Stewart’s Flatterland (2001) continue the story with the Square’s descendants. Rudy Rucker’s The Fourth Dimension (1984) is a popular guide to the mathematics whose second chapter retells Flatland. Behind them all stand two older books. One is Plato’s Republic, above all the Cave of Book VII, best read in Jowett’s Victorian translation, which Abbott’s first readers knew; the other is Emerson’s essay “Circles” (1841), which says in a few pages what the Dedication says in a single sentence.