Ashley Guffey Page One “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions written by schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott is not a romance in the modern sense of the word. The book was written in 1884, the tail end of the Romantic Period. The book describes a world in which there are only two dimensions as seen through the eyes of a Square. The square is our narrator for the tale and he goes into vast detail about said universe using geometric terms to comment on the hierarchy of the Victorian culture, making this a satirical novel. The story of flatland begins with a description of the world in two dimensions. People in this world have no concept of depth, only length and width. To them, the world appears to be vertical because the rain simply falls …show more content…
Isosceles triangles, the working class and the soldiers, are the lowest order. Equilateral triangles contain the merchant class because they are more regular. Squares are lawyers and pentagons are doctors and progressive numbers of sides, up to virtual circles, move up higher in leadership and governance. The circles form the nobility. The more sides there happen to be, the more intelligent and educated they are supposed to be. The Square dreams about a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland) and attempts to convince the realm's monarch of a second dimension but fails in doing so. He is visited by a three-dimensional sphere, which he has trouble comprehending until he sees Spaceland (a tridimensional world) for himself. This Sphere visits Flatland at the turn of each millennium to Ashley Guffey Page Two introduce the idea of a third dimension to a chosen individual in the hopes of eventually educating the entire population of Flatland. After the Square's mind is opened to new dimensions, he tries to convince the Sphere of the theoretical possibility of the existence of