Dedication and the reader being addressed

Use in the book

The dedication does more than announce a theme. It distributes positions. The writer calls himself humble, presents his initiation into three dimensions as an ascent, and addresses the readers' world as celestial. From the readers' position, however, three-dimensional life is ordinary. What looks like heaven from below may be merely another locality whose residents have their own limitations.

The syntax makes this relation repeatable. Even as the writer passed from two dimensions to three, readers may aspire to four, five or six. This is an invitation to extend an analogy, not an announcement that all those worlds have been visited. The hoped-for change in the reader is an enlarged imagination and a possible development of modesty. The adjective possible matters: neither reading the book nor inhabiting an additional dimension guarantees the virtue.

The final compliment to Superior Races of Solid Humanity can be heard as conventional flattery, racial and social self-congratulation, and a geometrical joke at once. The reader is solid because three-dimensional. Nothing in that fact proves greater kindness or a right to dominate others. When the Sphere later insults the Square and refuses to imagine a dimension beyond its own, the dedication's courteous experiment becomes a test the teacher also fails.

The dedicatory voice should not be simplified into a decoded political slogan. It works through irony whose object includes the speaker, the addressee and the posture of paying homage. A humble native can still flatter power; an honoured reader can still learn humility. The dedication establishes a standard against which the events of both parts can be read, while declining to certify that any character consistently meets it.

Places to read

1. Dedication“Space in General” gives the nominal audience an immense extension
2. Dedication“a Humble Native of Flatland” locates the offering below its recipients
3. Dedication“Four Five or even Six” extends the dimensional sequence as a hope
4. Dedication“possible Development” withholds a guarantee of moral progress
5. § 192345“There is no such land” shows the Sphere refusing the next application of that sequence

In this edition

The note identifies H. C. as generally understood to mean Howard Candler, while acknowledging that the book does not name him. The lexicon preserves that qualification. The edition's comparisons with mystery rites and the Prayer Book explain resonances in the dedication; they do not turn its geometrical hopes into a completed theology.

Celestial region

A heavenly-sounding designation of ordinary three-dimensional Space from the lower world's point of view. The flattering elevation of the reader's world is also an invitation to imagine something beyond it. Printed form: Celestial Region (Dedication). See Dedication and the reader being addressed.

H C

The individually addressed dedicatee within the general address to Space. The supplied editor generally identifies him as Howard Candler; the primary text gives initials only. Printed form: H. C. (Dedication). See Dedication and the reader being addressed.

A humble native addressing superior readers (contextual phrase)

Dedication: “a Humble Native of Flatland”. Humility is announced from a position that the reader can easily regard as inferior. Yet the address goes on to ask those superior readers for modesty, exposing the gap between receiving deference and deserving moral authority. Native also gives the speaker the role of a local guide explaining a strange society to visitors. Such a guide can know his world intimately without seeing the arrangements he has naturalised. The phrase therefore establishes both authority and limitation: he can teach outsiders, and those outsiders can recognise failings in him. The dedication asks whether the same reversal could happen to them. See Dedication and the reader being addressed and A Square and the voice of the memoir.