Easton Press Edwin Abbott books
Edwin Abbott Abbott biography
Edwin Abbott Abbott was an English theologian, educator, and author born in London in 1838. After a brilliant career at St John’s College, Cambridge, Abbott obtained a fellowship, was Master of King Edward’s School in Birmingham and at Clifton College, and from 1865 to 1889 was Headmaster of the City of London School.During that time, he wrote several theological works, a biography of Francis Bacon, and a standard Shakespearean grammar, but his best-known work is Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, written pseudonymously by “A Square” in 1884.
Flatland A Romance of Many Dimension
Flatland is a satirical novel that portrays a two-dimensional world like the surface of a map, over which its inhabitants move. Flatlanders have no concept of up and down and appear to each other as mere points or lines. From our three-dimensional perspective, we can look down on Flatland and see that its people are really a variety of shapes, including straight lines, which are the females; narrow isosceles triangles, the soldiers and workmen; equilateral triangles, lower middle-class men; squares and pentagons, professional men including the pseudonymous author, A Square; hexagons and other regular polygons with still more sides, which are the nobility; and circles, the priests.
Abbott uses these geometrical distinctions, especially the appearance of Flatland females and the working class, as a commentary on discrimination against women, rigid class stratification, and the lack of tolerance for irregularity that was prevalent in Victorian Britain.
In a dream, A Square visits the one-dimensional world of Lineland, where he tries unsuccessfully to persuade the king that there is such a thing as a second dimension. In turn, the narrator is told of three-dimensional space by a Sphere, who moves slowly through the plane of Flatland, growing and shrinking as his cross-section changes in size.
If a hypersphere—a four-dimensional sphere—were to move through our three-dimensional world, we would see a sphere appear, grow to a maximum size, and then shrink again before disappearing.
Abbott is aware that he is “cheating” a bit in his description of what the inhabitants of Flatland actually see. In his preface to the second edition, he gives a lengthy, though not entirely convincing, reply to the objection raised by some readers that a Flatlander, seeing a line, sees something that must be thick to the eye as well as long to the eye; otherwise, it would not be visible.
The interesting and often neglected fact is that we are just as unable to imagine what it would truly be like to see in two dimensions as we are to conceive of four dimensions.