Edwin A. Abbott

Abbott ran the City of London School for twenty-four years, taking the headmastership in 1865 at the age of twenty-six and leaving it in 1889. He made chemistry and English literature compulsory, and H. H. Asquith passed through his classrooms. Most of his output was theology and philology, including a Shakespearian Grammar of 1870 that scholars still cite. Flatland, which appeared in 1884 under the byline A Square, was a sideline that has outlived all of it. It describes a two-dimensional world of lines and polygons where social rank is set by the number of a figure's sides, and it works at once as a thought experiment about a fourth dimension and as satire on Victorian class and the position of women. Born in London in December 1838, he died there in October 1926.