Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Flatland was reviewed in The Athenaeum for 15 November 1884 by Arthur John Butler, who commented condescendingly that it was a ‘whimsical book’ which ‘seems to have a purpose, but what that maybe it is hard to discover.’ The mathematician and writer Charles Howard Hinton refers to Flatland in his first series of Scientific Romances where he discards its applicability to questions of higher space. The dangers to which we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity of Spaceland. In every Circular or Polygonal household it has been a habit from time immemorial – and now has become a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes – that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths towards their husband and his male friends.