SOURCE: Jann, Rosemary. “Abbott's Flatland: Scientific Imagination and Natural Christianity.” Victorian Studies 28, no. 3 (spring 1985): 473-90.

In the following essay, Jann argues that Abbott addresses in Flatland the Victorian conflict between spirit and intellect and therefore the contemporary debate over the role of hypothesis in scientific study.

Edwin Abbott's Flatland (1884), published under a pseudonym and scarcely acknowledged by his biographers, has become the best-known work of this late Victorian clergyman and headmaster.¹ As one of the first and surely the most entertaining speculations on the nature of the fourth dimension, Abbott's “Romance of Many Dimensions” has earned its place among science fiction classics. I will argue, however, that although its appeal to the imagination and to the possibilities of a “more Spacious Space” are timeless, Flatland also reveals strategies central to the brinksmanship of a late Victorian society divided between the needs of the spirit and the demands of...