Edwin Abbott Abbott
Life and career
Edwin Abbott Abbott was born in London in 1838, studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and became an Anglican clergyman and educator. He served as headmaster of the City of London School from 1865 to 1889, promoting a curriculum that included scientific as well as classical learning. His publications ranged from grammar and literary scholarship to theology. Flatland appeared in 1884 under the name A Square. He died in 1926. The book brings his interests together through a geometrical thought experiment that is also social satire, asking how a community's habits of perception can make its prejudices seem like facts of nature.
Geometry and the limits of confidence
Abbott makes a mathematical constraint into a way of examining social belief. The inhabitants of Flatland organize rank, education and gender through the characteristics of their bodies. Their explanations seem coherent from within the assumptions that sustain them. A change of dimension then exposes how narrow those assumptions may be. The satire becomes especially sharp when a person capable of recognizing one error remains comfortable with another. Intellectual discovery offers a possibility of change without guaranteeing freedom from prejudice.
Flatland
The narrator, A Square, begins by explaining his two-dimensional world. Questions of recognition and movement lead into an account of social organization, including severe restrictions upon women. Encounters with other dimensions subsequently test the narrator's confidence in what he has treated as possible. The book's educational ingenuity and its social criticism are interwoven: an unfamiliar geometrical idea becomes imaginable at the same time that a familiar habit of declaring difference impossible becomes harder to defend. A Square's voice remains an object of scrutiny throughout.
Notice where the narrator is comfortable
Identify a passage in which A Square explains an injustice without seeming troubled by it. Compare his manner there with his response when someone challenges the boundaries of his knowledge. Does recognizing his own exclusion help him understand the exclusion of others? Keeping both passages in view prevents the dimensional puzzle from exhausting the book's meaning. The thought experiment works most strongly when the reader also examines the confidence with which ordinary social arrangements are explained as unavoidable facts.