Dictionary of Literary Biography on Edwin A. Abbott
Edwin A. Abbott was a man of many qualities. As a cleric, a biblical and literary scholar, and an author, he established a minor but nonetheless significant place in Victorian literature. While many scholars remember Abbott for his well-known debate with John Henry Newman, readers of fantasy and science fiction are more familiar with the novel that combines several of his various interests: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884).
Abbott was a private man, and little is known of his life. He was born in London in 1838 to an Anglican family and received a degree in divinity at St. John's College at Cambridge University. He spent two years as assistant master at the King Edward School in Birmingham, then from 1865 to 1889 served as headmaster at the City of London School, where he championed the study of English. After his educational career Abbott devoted himself to scholarship, aided by his 1875 appointment as a lecturer at Cambridge. His earliest publications included books on William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope and on grammar and rhetoric. He also edited a collection of Francis Bacon's essays and wrote a historical Christian novel, Philochristus: Memoirs of a Disciple of the Lord (1878). Neither these books nor the many books on theology and literature he later published, however, bear any resemblance to his best-known work, Flatland.
In Flatland Abbott creates a fictional world of only two dimensions rather than three. Using his mathematical knowledge, he delineates a universe inhabited by two-dimensional beings. The narrator, a square, begins by introducing readers to his two-dimensional world, including its different types of life and its social order. A males position in this social order is determined by angles and sides: for instance, the square narrator, a lawyer, is higher in the social hierarchy than triangles (who tend to be laborers, soldiers, and merchants) but lower than more-complex regular figures.
The highest figures in Flatland are those with so many sides and angles that they are close to being circles. Parents aspire to have children who possess more sides and angles than themselves; while the term upward mobility would have no literal meaning in a two-dimensional world, this is the intent. In addition, figures with irregular angles are considered outcasts and criminals. Thus, Abbott subtly satirizes Victorian class distinctions in the three-dimensional world.
Abbott also satirizes gender differences in Flatland. In this two-dimensional world males are geometric figures and females are closer to line segments. Since this society values multiple sides and regular angles, women obviously are second-class citizens in Flatland. However, they are nonetheless powerful figures, since their sharp forms can puncture and deflate the males. Given this fact and their emotionally volatile natures, females in Flatland are governed by sets of rules that limit their full participation in society. Clearly in Flatland Abbott critiques the patriarchal Victorian paternalism in relation to women.
Other social conventions are satirized in Flatland as well. For instance, since Flatland is a two-dimensional world, its inhabitants see each other as line segments or, if facing a female directly, a point. Thus, distinctions between people, though they exist, are difficult to perceive. Significantly, the ability to judge another's shape, and with that another's status, comes mainly with education.
The second part of the novel concerns the narrators vision of a one-dimensional world called Lineland. More fantastic and less satiric than the first part of Flatland, this section describes what life might be like in such a world. This dream of Lineland is both highly imaginative and mathematically intriguing.
The tables are turned on the narrator in the last third of Flatland, in which the two-dimensional being encounters a being from Spaceland--in other words, a being from a three-dimensional world. The Spacelander, Lord Sphere, tries valiantly to explain the concept of three dimensions to someone who knows only two, but the square cannot understand and feels threatened by the Spacelander's seemingly supernatural view of events in Flatland granted by his three-dimensional perspective. As the Flatlander was attacked by the Linelanders, so the Flatlander here attacks the Spacelander--a sharp commentary on how people tend to respond to things beyond their understanding. The Spacelander then lifts the square to three-dimensional space, from which he can see Flatland from above. The narrator then accepts the notion of space and ascribes divinity to its inhabitants, which the Spacelander appropriately denies. Such an ascription is natural, however, since in the squares world the most powerful beings are those many-sided males closest to circles; a sphere must be much greater still, so the square thinks. Also, some readers have seen this encounter as a metaphor for humanity's limited understanding in its encounters with the divine--which is certainly plausible given Abbott's theological preoccupations.
Any notions of more than two dimensions are considered heretical in Flatland, so the narrator's experiences with the sphere lead him to trouble with the Flatland Council. Still, despite persecution and imprisonment, he continues to insist on the reality of a three-dimensional world, worlds of more than three dimensions, and a world revealed by the sphere called Pointland, inhabited by a single being satisfied with its own existence and unaware of the existence of others. This is the most religious part of Flatland, exhibiting Abbott's concerns about the nature of religious truth and understanding.
Contemporary reviewers were mixed in their reception of the novel. Some appreciated its imagination and satire, while others found the book tedious and didactic. Many readers were puzzled by what they took to be the metaphorical intent of the novel, unsure if Abbott was suggesting that God occupies a higher dimension and can become partially manifest on the human plane just as Lord Sphere can appear in Flatland as a cross section or whether the divine is more vaguely related to the natural world like a three-dimensional world would be related to one of two dimensions.
Though Abbott never clarified these issues in subsequent editions of Flatland, he defined his religious views in his many theological works, especially in his late entry into the Tractarian controversy. This debate centered around an Anglican priest and writer, John Henry Newman, who promoted traditionalism within the Church of England and, when instead the church continued to incorporate modern tendencies, converted to Roman Catholicism. In contrast, Abbott was comfortable with both his membership in the Church of England and a modern scientific worldview, and his Philomythus, an Antidote against Credulity: A Discussion of Cardinal Newman's Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles (1891) is one of several responses to the more-traditional beliefs of Newman and others.
In his religious writings Abbott also distinguished between the miraculous, which he dismissed as untrue, and the supernatural, which he thought was different from the miraculous in being both above nature yet linked to nature. In this way one might see a connection between Abbott's romance of many dimensions and his theological beliefs.
Flatland has since inspired various influences and tributes. For instance, both Rudy Rucker's story "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland," collected in his The 57th Franz Kafka (1983), and the Hypernaut story in the Tales of the Uncanny issue of Alan Moore's 1993 comic-book miniseries 1963 draw on Abbott's fictional world as part of their own. Also, related books and sequels have been published, including An Episode of Flatland (1907) by the logician C. H. Hinton, Sphereland (1965) by Dionys Berger, and The Planiverse (1984) by A. K. Dewdney.
The combination of intriguing ideas and playfulness in Flatland has made it consistently popular with a select group of readers, and it has been reprinted often since its initial publication, usually under Abbott's name. Readers of fantasy have often appreciated its extreme otherworldliness, while science-fiction readers frequently have admired Abbott's logical extrapolations from the premise of the story.
In addition, the novel has been used by mathematics instructors to illustrate various concepts. While not as widely known as the fantasies of a professional mathematician who wrote as Lewis Carroll, Flatland still holds a unique place in the history of fantasy and science fiction.
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