Written pseudonymously by "A Square",[1] the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

[3] The story describes a two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric figures (flatlanders[4]); women are line segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides.

On New Year's Eve, the Square dreams of a visit to a one-dimensional world, "Lineland", inhabited by men, who are lines, while the women are "lustrous points".

The Square then has a dream in which the Sphere revisits him, this time to introduce him to a zero-dimensional space, Pointland, of whom the Point (sole inhabitant, monarch, and universe in one) perceives any communication as a thought originating in his own mind (cf.

Seven years after being imprisoned, A Square writes out the book Flatland as a memoir, hoping to keep it as posterity for a future generation that can see beyond their two-dimensional existence.

Men are portrayed as polygons whose social status is determined by their regularity and the number of their sides, with a Circle considered the "perfect" shape.

The "Art of Sight Recognition", practised by the upper classes, is aided by "Fog", which allows an observer to determine the depth of an object.

The population of Flatland can "evolve" through the "Law of Nature", which states: "a male child shall have one more side than his father, so that each generation shall rise (as a rule) one step in the scale of development and nobility.

Furthermore, the angle of an Isosceles Triangle or the number of sides of a (regular) Polygon may be altered during life by deeds or surgical adjustments.

Apart from Isosceles Triangles, only regular Polygons are considered until chapter seven of the book when the issue of irregularity, or physical deformity is brought up.

If the error of deviation is above a stated amount, the irregular Polygon faces euthanasia; if below, he becomes the lowest rank of civil servant.

In his Preface to the Second and Revised Edition, 1884, he answers such critics by emphasizing that the description of women was satirizing the viewpoints held, stating that the Square: was writing as a Historian, he has identified himself (perhaps too closely) with the views generally adopted by Flatland and (as he has been informed) even by Spaceland, Historians; in whose pages (until very recent times) the destinies of Women and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration.Flatland did not have much success when published, although it was not entirely ignored.

[8] In the entry on Edwin Abbott in the Dictionary of National Biography for persons who died in the period of 1922 to 1930, Flatland was not even mentioned.

[2] The book was discovered again after Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity was published, which brought to prominence the concept of a fourth dimension.

Flatland was mentioned in a letter by William Garnett entitled "Euclid, Newton and Einstein" published in Nature on 12 February 1920.

If there is motion of our three-dimensional space relative to the fourth dimension, all the changes we experience and assign to the flow of time will be due simply to this movement, the whole of the future as well as the past always existing in the fourth dimension.The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography subsequently revised his biography to state that [Abbott] "is most remembered as the author of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions".