Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Textual Notes

Flatland was published by Seeley and Co. of London in the last days of October 1884, under the name A Square, and a second edition, called on its title page New and Revised Edition, followed in December 1884. It added the Preface and two passages in answer to the Athenaeum, in § 16 and § 19, and made the two corrections, of Dodecahedron and of a slip in a footnote, that the Note on the Text describes. The American edition, published in Boston by Roberts Brothers in 1885, was set from the first edition and has neither the Preface nor the passage added to § 16. In 1926 Basil Blackwell of Oxford issued a third edition, marked revised, with an introduction by William Garnett and, for the first time, the author’s name. The transcription of 1995 from which many modern texts descend proves to have been made at least in part from a printing later than 1884, since at least one of its readings agrees with the third edition against the second.

This edition returns to the second edition of 1884 throughout. Every reading of wording and capitals in which the modern transcription had strayed from that printing has been restored, together with Abbott’s own mixture of spellings in -ise and -ize, and the Note on the Text gives their number. Most are small, and a few change the sense. In the Preface the Editor again quotes one of your own Spaceland poets, whose line now ends makes all worlds akin! In § 3 the numbers of the rabble are again too much for the wisdom even of the Circles, and the angle of the Equilateral is the harmless angle, not the comparatively harmless angle. In § 5 the fashionable formula is again permit me to feel you Mr. Jones, in § 9 geometry falls into disrepute, not disrespect, and in § 10 the angry wives kill their innocent children and husbands.

In Part II the Square again doubts that the King of Lineland can tell your right side from my left (§ 14), and the King takes a census local, corporal, mental, and spiritual. The Sphere tells his pupil Now you can yourself give the answer (§ 16), and from Spaceland the household is Servants, Butler, Daughter, in their several apartments, while the President summons the guard, not the guards (§ 18). The Point sings the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being (§ 20), and the Square writes but I know that to any Woman, in the present tense, where the later text has knew. Two readings of 1884 that look wrong are kept, with notes at their places, and in § 3 the text has the occasional emergence of an Isosceles, where the sense needs an Equilateral and later printings supply one. In § 15 the night ends with The second Millennium had begun, where the modern transcription reads third. The year that is closing is 1999, and § 18 shows the Council meeting in the years 0, 1000 and 2000, so that the millennium beginning in 2000 should be the third, but second is what Abbott printed and this edition prints it. One plain misprint has been emended.

§ 6.—Of Recognition by Sight. If for example for It for example. The 1884 second edition reads It, a misprint; the sense requires If.