SOURCE: Smith, Jonathan. Review of Flatland, by Edwin Abbott. Victorian Studies 36, no. 1 (fall 1992): 94-5.

In the following review, Smith discusses the long-lived appeal of Flatland and Thomas Banchoff's introduction to the novel.

Edwin Abbott was one of Victorian Britain's most fascinating and wide-ranging figures. Appointed headmaster of the City of London School in 1865 at the age of twenty-six, he quickly developed a reputation as a leading educational reformer, championing the introduction throughout the curriculum of such subjects as natural science and English literature. During his quarter-century at the CLS, Abbott published, in addition to Flatland (1884), textbooks on writing, Latin, and Shakespeare; scholarly works on Bacon and theology; and several Christian historical novels. When he retired in 1889, it was to devote the remainder of his life to the development of his theological system, the multi-volume Diatessarica. Yet it is Flatland, the clever little mathematical “Romance in Many Dimensions,” that...