A New Angle on Life

To save a little money for travelling before university, I took a job in the stockroom of a women’s fashion store in the nearest town. I had to be on site to receive deliveries before the store opened, which meant catching the bus that glided, spectre-like, past my rural home just before 5 a.m. most mornings. I kept watch, fully dressed for work under a quilted dressing-gown, by the window at the top of the stairs, so that I could spot the headlights between the trees and so have enough time to dash outside and flag it down with vigorous torch and arm-waving.

Despite the commute, the unsociable work suited me well: quiet mornings spent folding clothes and unpacking boxes in a labyrinth of dusty corridors, stairways and cupboards, with only my own thoughts for company. Absolute bliss. The highlight of my day, however, was the lunch break when, instead of joining the queue for the microwave in the staffroom, I took my cheese sandwich to an uncomfortable little armchair in my local library and read. Of course, I had the reading list that had been recommended for my undergraduate course – the usual assortment of Great Works by (usually) Great Men. However, finding myself installed less than a metre from the beginning of the fiction shelves, I found that I couldn’t resist the temptation to let the library guide my choices. I would read from the very beginning, alphabetically speaking: from ‘A’. Thankfully, the selection did not start with Anonymous as it does on our bookshelves at home today, so the first title I found myself munching through during those lunch breaks was Abbott (Edwin A.), Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The slim volume I held in my hands (an Oxford World’s Classic, edited by Rosemary Jann) named Abbott as the author, though readers of the first edition of Flatland, published in 1884, would have held a copy of the collected memoirs of ‘A Square’, a two-dimensional citizen of his home world, Flatland, and the adventures that ensue when he is contacted by a stranger (a Sphere) from the world of three dimensions (Spaceland). To be honest, ‘adventures’ may be overselling it. In reality, very little actually happens in Flatland. Just over half the book is dedicated to what modern fiction-writing courses refer to as ‘unnecessary preamble’, as A Square describes the history, society and customs of his two- dimensional world. The ‘action’ of the second half consists primarily of conversation on the topic of mathematics, though there are moments of drama as our protagonist meets resistance from the ruling classes of his homeland when trying to share his knowledge of the higher dimensions. Yet it is Abbott’s skill as a satirist that keeps me returning to the book. I like to think that our quadrilateral narrator would have appreciated my alphabetical approach to reading. Like me, A Square enjoys order in life: the world he shows us is governed entirely mathematically and, at the beginning of his narrative, he seems to prefer it that way. All the two-dimensional inhabitants of Flatland are organized in a strict geometrical hierarchy: Isosceles Triangles are the working class and the army, Equilateral Triangles are merchants, Squares and Pentagons make up a professional class, and so on, through the bewilderingly subtle distinctions of the Polygonal nobility, right up to the priestly Circular class. Abbott creates this fantastical world in order to satirize what he saw as the increasingly indefensible, yet entrenched, beliefs about society and gender in late Victorian Britain. In this way, Flatland looks both backwards and forwards, managing to continue a tradition of satire starting with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726: see SF no.50), while also anticipating the dystopian warnings of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and (especially) Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924). Like the best science fiction, Flatland makes us question the assumptions and contradictions of our own world by seeing them parodied in an alien, unfamiliar context. Social mobility in Flatland is achieved through the ‘evolutionary’ addition of a side (and thus an increase in interior angles) in each generation. The son of a Square, for example, will be a Pentagon. This theoretically fair system is undermined in practice, as such theoretically fair systems usually are: the opportunity for advancement is inaccessible to shapes below the level of an Isosceles Triangle. Understandably, this barrier is unpopular with the working class and has resulted in ‘one hundred and twenty rebellions’, though all such uprisings have so far been quelled. Much of Abbott’s own life had been lived against a background of working-class civil unrest, most notably the Chartist uprisings of the 1840s and ’50s, and so it is hard not to see Victorian social divisions being satirized on this two- dimensional scale. But Abbott saves his most biting satire for his contemporaries’ attitude towards women: in Flatland, in contrast to the many male shapes mentioned above, women are all straight lines, falling outside the social and professional hierarchy. Without height or width – and therefore, in a sense, not even two-dimensional – Flatlander women are often completely invisible to their male counterparts, as well as being incredibly dangerous: ‘for, if a Soldier [an isosceles triangle] is a wedge, a Woman is a needle: being, so to speak, all point.’ The most significant disadvantage the women of Flatland face, however, is one of opportunity for advancement: “Once a Woman, always a Woman” is the Decree of Nature; and the very Laws of Evolution seem suspended in her disfavour.’ Abbott had observed the struggles for equality of opportunity for women at close quarters. Only a few years before the publication of Flatland, he had been championing the cause of women’s education, working with the indomitable Maria Grey on her campaign to establish a teacher- training college for women. Maria faced significant resistance, and Abbott’s support was clearly instrumental in her eventual success: in 1879, she wrote that ‘Dr Abbott deserves more thanks than I can express.’ The following year, twenty-four female students from the newly established Maria Grey Teaching College passed the entrance examinations to study at the University of Cambridge, Abbott’s alma mater, at a time when female students at Cambridge were still denied the right to be awarded degrees (a right they would not be granted until 1947). Abbott poured all his frustrations about Victorian society’s attitude to women into Flatland, yet, as Rosemary Jann points out in her introduction, much of the irony was clearly missed by contemporary readers. In the preface to the second edition, ‘the Editor’ feels compelled to respond to accusations that the author is ‘a woman-hater’ by assuring readers that A Square ‘inclines to the opinion . . . that the Straight Lines are in many important respects superior to the Spheres’, but that ‘as a Historian’ he feels obliged to conform to the views held by most contemporary historians, ‘in whose pages (until very recent times) the destinies of Women . . . have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration’. I found Flatland at an important juncture in my life: university would have a profound impact on my outlook, making me challenge preconceptions I had formed about the world (and about myself) in the way a good humanities degree should. My tutors and dissertation supervisors encouraged me to learn more, and to assume less. I was urged not just to find new answers but to leave myself open to new questions. Yet it was this strange mathematical ‘romance’ that put me on the first step of this road. As our quadrilinear guide explains in his Dedication, he hopes his memoirs will help us to ‘aspire yet higher and higher’,

Thereby contributing To the Enlargement of the Imagination And the possible Development Of that most rare and excellent Gift of Modesty

It is this hopeful concept of modesty – a rallying cry to identify the gaps in our knowledge, and to dedicate ourselves to filling them – that I find so appealing about Flatland, especially in our present age of bombastic politicians and ‘thought leaders’. It remains as relevant, provocative and entertaining today as it must have done when it first appeared almost 140 years ago. In case you were wondering, my alphabetical approach to lunchtime reading – disrupted as it was by the borrowing and returning of books – proved a very frustrating way to use a library. So, having discovered Achebe (Chinua), Alcott (Louisa May) and Ali (Monica), I had only just started on Amis (Kingsley), The Old Devils, when I departed for my travels, and my Grand Reading Project was left, perhaps predictably, incomplete.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Samuel Saloway-Cooke 2023