Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Notes on Sources

How this edition was made. The text is that of the revised second edition of 1884, established by collating a modern transcription word for word against the 1884 printing and restoring its readings, as the Note on the Text and the Textual Notes describe. The notes were researched from primary sources wherever they could be reached, from the editions of 1884 and Abbott’s other books to the periodicals of 1884 and 1885, the Greek of Plato and Aristotle and the King James Bible. Standard works of reference filled the gaps. Reviewers then checked the whole edition for accuracy of fact, for anything in the notes or the front matter that would give the story away, and for the text itself.

The notes. They gloss Abbott’s geometry, his Victorian targets, his allusions to Shakespeare, Scripture and the classics, and the readings of 1884 that are kept against later texts. Shakespeare is cited by act, scene and line in the Folger edition, and the Bible in the King James Version. Plato is cited by the Stephanus pages printed in the margins of every edition, usually in Jowett’s Victorian translation, and Aristotle by the pages of Bekker’s edition.

Open questions. Several things remain uncertain. The H. C. of the Dedication is most probably Howard Candler, but the identification rests on later reports of an inscribed copy and of a remark by Abbott that has not been traced, not on anything in the book. No surviving review has been found that calls the Square a woman-hater in those words, although the Preface says the charge was pressed, and the nearest approaches in print are The Architect’s guess that the narrator had been jilted and Tucker’s in Nature. The figure of a thousand copies often given for the first edition has no stated source, and the second edition is said to have corrected some of the figures, though which ones has not been established. Several notices of 1884 and 1885 remain to be studied, among them those in The Oxford Magazine, The Cambridge Review and the New York Tribune, and the review in the spiritualist weekly Light of January 1885. What the women’s papers of the day made of the book is not known, and they may yet show who pressed the charge that the Preface answers. Whether Abbott had read Hinton’s essay of 1880 before he wrote his own book is also unknown.