Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
by Lewis Carroll
Summary
Alice climbs through the drawing room mirror into a looking glass world laid out like an enormous chessboard, where the rules of the game double as the rules of travel, a pawn moving square by square toward becoming a queen. She argues etiquette with the quarrelsome twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, receives an entire lecture on the meanings of invented words from the smug, breakable Humpty Dumpty, and is escorted for a stretch by the gentle, hapless White Knight, whose repeated tumbles from his horse and whose strange inventions make him one of the book's warmest presences. The severe Red Queen marches Alice at a run that never actually covers any ground, since in this country it takes all the running one can do just to stay in the same place, and Time itself appears as an offended character elsewhere in Carroll's Wonderland books, though here the logic runs instead on chess and mirror reversal, memory working backward, cake handed round before it is cut. Alice reaches the eighth square, becomes a queen, and the whole adventure dissolves as she wakes in her armchair, Carroll leaving it open, in the book's own words, which of them, Alice or the Red King dreaming her, the dream truly belonged to.
Carroll fills the book with verse the two books together have made permanent parts of the language, Jabberwocky first among them, along with The Walrus and the Carpenter and the White Knight's own wandering ballad. The nonsense here is more structured than in the first Alice book, built deliberately on chess moves even where Carroll bends the actual rules, and it rewards a reader happy to follow language wherever Carroll's logic takes it rather than demanding the nonsense resolve into sense.
A closing acrostic poem spells out, letter by letter down the page, the name of the real Alice Liddell who inspired both books.
Historical Context & Significance
Macmillan published Through the Looking Glass in December 1871, dated 1872 on the title page, as a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and it matched the original's success outright, selling fifteen thousand copies within weeks. The Pall Mall Gazette singled out Jabberwocky specifically, finding its opening and closing stanza more affecting than anything else in the book and judging the whole almost up to the standard of its predecessor, while the Illustrated London News called the sequel quite as rich in humorous whims of fantasy as the first book. The Times agreed that the nonsense almost equaled its predecessor's and was far more charming than half the literature bought and sold as solid sense.
Carroll cut roughly fourteen hundred words featuring a wasp in a yellow wig after his illustrator John Tenniel objected to it, and the excised episode stayed lost until a 1974 auction turned it up. The book has been adapted repeatedly for stage, film, and television, and phrases it introduced, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday among them, remain in everyday English use.