Ezra Pound's call to his contemporaries to ‘make it new’, although suggesting avantgarde intent, was actually part of a concentrated interest in ‘the new’ in Anglo-American culture and is traceable as far back as at least the 1880s. As Holbrook Jackson observed in 1913, the popularity of the adjective new grew during the fin de siecle. Writing of the New Realism in 1897, H. D. Traill claimed that ‘not to be new is, in these days, to be nothing’. Other notable examples of the vogue of the new are the New Spirit, the New Drama of Ibsen and, of course, the New Woman. It is not surprising then that a ‘new geometry’ would appeal to this generation of writers and thinkers. It is in this context that we should consider Charles Howard Hinton's hyperspace philosophy, which was first fully expressed in A New Era of Thought (1888). In this book he promised to ‘bring forward a complete system of four-dimensional thought – mechanics, science, and art’. While Hinton did not live to complete this system, his belief in the applicability of ‘fourdimensional thought’ across multiple discourses was appropriate: the history of the concept of the spatial fourth dimension is a history of movement. It is also part of the shared history of modernism.

The rise of non-Euclidean geometry in the second half of the nineteenth century served to emphasize the contingency of even mathematical knowledge, pushing debates about the relativity of knowledge to the forefront in a way that must have been particularly distressing for conservative thinkers. Euclid's axioms, which had remained largely uncontested for nearly two thousand years, were no longer sacrosanct. ‘The argument concerning the relativity of knowledge is absolutely necessary to the emergence of modernism,’ Gillian Beer correctly explains, finding ‘the cognate confusion between method and findings’ in late Victorian mathematics and physics particularly suited for uncovering connections with ‘proto-modernist texts’. The first part of the present chapter traces the movement of the concept of the fourth dimension from its origins in analytical geometry to its leap to narrativization via the dimensional analogy; in the second part I consider Hinton's particular interpretation of the fourth dimension in light of his early intellectual influences, including James Hinton, Ruskin and Kant.