Edwin Abbott Abbott
1838–1926
Biography
Edwin Abbott Abbott lived from 1838 to 1926 and combined three callings: teacher, theologian and Anglican clergyman. Born in London, he was schooled at the City of London School before going up to St John's College, Cambridge. There he earned top marks in classics, maths and theology, and he was afterwards elected a fellow of the college. He took holy orders in 1862. At twenty-six, in 1865, he was made head of the City of London School, a post he held while the future prime minister H. H. Asquith was among its pupils. He stepped down in 1889 and turned fully to writing.
Abbott's writing ranged across education, language and religion. His Shakespearian Grammar of 1870 is regarded as a useful study of Elizabethan English, and a biography of Francis Bacon followed in 1885. His theological work included religious romances published anonymously, such as Philochristus (1878) and Onesimus (1882), and a critical study of the Gospels that stirred debate in English church circles. He also wrote Via Latina, a Latin textbook that was widely used in schools, and in his later years he devoted himself to theology.
The book on this site is Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published in 1884. Its narrator is a square who lives in a flat, two-dimensional world, and a sphere takes him on a journey to a world of three dimensions. The novella uses that journey to explore what dimensions are and how hard it is to picture a space one has never seen, and beneath its geometry it satirises the rigid class order of Victorian society. Critics have often placed it among science fiction, though it is usually called mathematical fiction, and it has inspired many later works and found a new readership since the 1950s.
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Books
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
by Edwin Abbott Abbott
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English theologian, Anglican priest and schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884 by Seeley & Co. of London. Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional…
Summary from Wikipedia: Flatland (CC BY-SA 4.0)