Flatland

England a little book titled Flatland, which invited its readers to consider the outrageous possibility of four dimensions and more. Flatland slyly accomplished this suggestion by portraying the highly limited life of a world of only two dimensions, whose inhabitants cannot imagine, and do not want to imagine, a third dimension. In Flatland, all existence and experience is confined to a plane. Nothing has thickness. People come in the shape of triangles, squares, pentagons, and so on, the greater the number of sides, the higher the status. Since all geometrical shapes appear as straight lines when viewed edge on and edge on is the only possibility in Flatland inhabitants must feel each other s angles for proper recognition. Interiors of closed figures are invisible. Rain slides across the world plane from the north; consequently each house is oriented so that its roof side faces that direction.

The author of this extended fable was the Reverend Edwin Abbott Abbott, born in 1838, educated at St. John s in Cambridge, and ordained in 1862. Abbott was a classicist, Bible scholar, and, from 1865 to 1889, headmaster of the great City of London School, which he himself had attended before university. Abbott came from a line of headmasters, his father, Edwin Abbott, having been headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone.

In the edition of the British Dictionary of National Biography for persons who died in the period of 1922 to 1930, no reference is made to Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). Abbott is indeed celebrated as a writer, with special notice of his school primer How to Write Clearly (1872), his literary criticism such as Shakespearean Grammar (1870), and his many theological writings such as Philochristus (1878), Onesimus: Memoirs of a Disciple of Paul (1882), and Johannine Grammar (1906). But his greatest achievement, from the vantage of a few years after his death, was as a teacher.