A Leap of Faith: Abbott, Bellamy, Morris, Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Route to Utopia

In the great surge of utopian writing that was produced during the fin de siècle, Edward Bellamy, William Morris and H. G. Wells among others imagined utopias that were global in scale and located in the future. They made a radical shift in utopian thinking by drawing a historical trajectory between their own time and that of utopia. A contemporaneous text that might seem to have little in common with these “historical utopias” is E. A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). This article shows how closely its ideas can bring into focus those of the specifically utopian texts being written alongside it. Flatland breaks the conventions of utopian narrative by removing the reader from the narrative plane and situating us instead in the “impossible” third dimension. The “leap of faith” necessary for scientific or religious revelation is simultaneously invoked as the route to utopia.