Author: Edwin Abbott Abbott

What sits here is not Flatland but Abbott's composition manual, a short Victorian handbook of rules and exercises for writing English plainly, produced for schoolboys and still quoted by people who teach prose. Edwin Abbott Abbott, who carried the repeated surname because his parents were first cousins, became headmaster of the City of London School at twenty-six, and wrote extensively on Shakespeare and on liberal theology. Flatland, the two-dimensional satire that has outlived everything else he did, appeared in 1884 under the name A Square, and is as much about Victorian class and the position of women as it is about geometry.