Through the Looking-Glass

For other uses, see Through the Looking Glass (disambiguation).

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Alice passes through the looking-glass and out the other side
Author	Lewis Carroll
Illustrator	John Tenniel
Genre	Children's fiction
Publisher	Macmillan
Publication date	December 1871
Publication place	London
Preceded by	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a novel published in December 1871 by Lewis Carroll, the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, University of Oxford. It was the sequel to his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which many of the characters are anthropomorphic playing-cards. In this sequel the theme is chess. As in the earlier book, the central figure, Alice, again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a looking-glass (a large mirror) into a world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just as in a reflection, things are reversed, including logic (for example, running helps one remain stationary, walking away from something brings one towards it, chessmen are alive and nursery rhyme characters are embodied).

Among the characters Alice meets are the severe Red Queen, the gentle and flustered White Queen, the quarrelsome twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the rude and opinionated Humpty-Dumpty, and the kindly but impractical White Knight. Eventually, as in the earlier book, after a succession of strange adventures, Alice wakes and realises she has been dreaming.

The book contains several verse passages, including "Jabberwocky", "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and the White Knight's ballad, "A-sitting On a Gate". Like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the book introduces phrases that have become common currency, including "jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day", "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast", "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean", "un-birthday presents", "portmanteau words", "Anglo-Saxon attitudes" and "as large as life and twice as natural".

Through the Looking Glass has been adapted for the stage and the screen and translated into many languages. Critical opinion of the book has generally been favourable and either ranked it on a par with its predecessor or else only just short of it.

Background and first publication

Carroll, 1863 photograph

Although by 1871 Lewis Carroll had published several books and papers under his real name – Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – they had all been scholarly works about mathematics, on which he lectured at the University of Oxford. Under his pseudonym he had published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the work for which he was known to the wider public. That book was greatly different from most Victorian literature for children. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes it as "a landmark 'nonsense' text, liberating children from didactic fiction". A reviewer at the time of publication commented that the book "has no moral, and does not teach anything. It is without any of that bitter foundation which some people imagine ought to be at the bottom of all children’s books". Another wrote, "If there be such a thing as perfection in children’s tales, we should be tempted to say that Mr Carroll had reached it". The book sold in large numbers, and within a year of its publication Carroll was contemplating a sequel.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had grown from stories Carroll improvised for Alice Liddell and her sisters, the daughters of his neighbours Henry and Lorina Liddell. The proposed sequel had fewer such sources to draw on and was planned from the outset for publication. When Lorina Liddell became pregnant again the three children were sent to stay with their maternal grandmother at her house, Hetton Lawn, Charlton Kings, near Cheltenham, where Carroll visited them. Above the drawing-room fireplace there was an enormous looking-glass (in more modern terms, a mirror). Carroll's biographer Morton N. Cohen suggests that it may have inspired the idea of climbing up to the chimney-piece and going through to the other side of the looking-glass. This was not confirmed by Carroll, nor an alternative account stating that the looking-glass theme was suggested by another Alice – Carroll's cousin Alice Raikes – who recalled being in his company as a child and standing in front of a long mirror, holding an orange in her right hand. Carroll asked her in which hand the little girl in the mirror held it, and she replied, "The left hand ... but if I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right?"

In August 1866 Carroll wrote to his publisher, Alexander Macmillan, "It will probably be some time before I again indulge in paper and print. I have, however, a floating idea of writing a sort of sequel to Alice". He developed the idea, working slowly and intermittently; in February 1867 he told Macmillan, "I am hoping before long to complete another book about Alice. ... You would not, I presume, object to publish the book, if it should ever reach completion". In January 1869 he sent Macmillan the first completed chapter of the new book, tentatively titled Behind the Looking-Glass, and then spent a further year finishing the rest. The title of the book caused him some difficulty. He considered calling it Looking-Glass World, but Macmillan was unenthusiastic. At the suggestion of an Oxford colleague, Henry Liddon, Carroll adopted the title Through the Looking-Glass.

Illustrations

John Tenniel: self-portrait

Carroll had great difficulty in finding an illustrator for the book. He first approached John Tenniel, whose drawings for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had been well received: The Pall Mall Gazette said, "The illustrations by Mr Tenniel are beyond praise. His rabbit, his puppy, his mad hatter are things not to be forgotten". The collaboration had not been smooth: Carroll was a perfectionist and insisted on minutely controlling all aspects of the production of his books. His publishers, Macmillan, arranged for printing and distribution (for a ten per cent commission), but Carroll paid all the costs – printing, illustration and advertising – and made all the decisions. Tenniel was not enthusiastic about working with Carroll again; he said he was too busy as chief cartoonist for Punch and declined the commission. He suggested one of his predecessors at Punch, Richard Doyle, but Carroll thought him "no longer good enough". Other artists considered but rejected were Arthur Hughes and W. S. Gilbert. Macmillan suggested Noel Paton, who had drawn the frontispiece for The Water Babies, but he declined because of pressure of other work. Eventually Carroll made a second approach to Tenniel, who reluctantly agreed to provide the illustrations for the new book, but only at his own pace. Carroll noted in his diary, "He thinks it possible (but not likely) that we might get it out by Christmas 1869".

The Wasp in a Wig

While the book was at proof stage, Carroll made a substantial cut of about 1,400 words. The omitted section introduced a wasp wearing a yellow wig and includes a complete five-stanza poem that Carroll did not reuse elsewhere. If included in the book it would have followed, or been included at the end of, Chapter Eight – the chapter featuring the encounter with the White Knight. Tenniel wrote to Carroll:

Don't think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the 'wasp' chapter doesn't interest me in the least, & I can't see my way to a picture. If you wish to shorten the book, I can't help thinking – with all submission – that there is your opportunity.

The author cut the section. The manuscript has never been found and scholars searched unsuccessfully for years for traces of the missing material. Doubts arose whether it had ever existed, but in 1974 the London auction house Sothebys offered for sale a batch of galley proofs with revisions in Carroll's handwriting, and a note, also in his hand, directing the printer to take the section out of the book. The chapter was first published in 1977 in a 37-page book by the Carroll scholar Martin Gardner, issued in New York by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and in London by Macmillan. It was reproduced in full by the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph in September of that year, with notes by Cohen. Although Tenniel had told Carroll that "a wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art", the text printed by The Sunday Telegraph was accompanied by illustrations specially drawn or painted by Ralph Steadman, Sir Hugh Casson, Peter Blake and Patrick Procktor.

Publication

On 4 January 1871 Carroll finished the text, and later that month wrote that the second Alice book "has cost me, I think, more trouble than the first, and ought to be equal to it in every way". Tenniel had yet to produce nearly half the pictures. By the end of the year the book was ready for press. (The title page carries the publication date 1872, but Through the Looking-Glass was on sale in time for Christmas 1871.) Within weeks 15,000 copies had been sold. The first American edition was issued by Lee and Sheppard of Boston and New York in 1872.

Characters

At the start of the book, Carroll includes a list of "Dramatis Personae as arranged before commencement of game". He then gives notes to the chess game the characters play out in the story.

Looking-glass countryside laid out like a chessboard

White Pieces	White Pawns	Red Pawns	Red Pieces
Tweedledee	Daisy	Daisy	Humpty Dumpty
Unicorn	Haigha	Messenger	Carpenter
Sheep	Oyster	Oyster	Walrus
White Queen	Lily	Tiger-lily	Red Queen
White King	Fawn	Rose	Red King
Aged man	Oyster	Oyster	Crow
White Knight	Hatta	Frog	Red Knight
Tweedledum	Daisy	Daisy	Lion

For other characters, see List of minor characters in Through the Looking-Glass.

Plot

Alice lifts the White King from the floor to the table

Chapter One. Looking-Glass House

On a snowy November night Alice is sitting in an armchair before the fireplace, playing with a white kitten ("Snowdrop") and a black kitten ("Kitty"). She talks to the black kitten about the game of chess and speculates what the world is like on the other side of a mirror. Climbing up to the chimney piece, she touches the looking-glass above the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she can step through it: "In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room". She finds herself in a reflected version of her own home and notices a book with looking-glass poetry, "Jabberwocky", whose reversed printing she can read only by holding it up to the mirror. She also observes that in this room her chess pieces have come to life, although they remain small enough for her to pick up.

Chapter Two. The Garden of Live Flowers

On leaving the house Alice enters a sunny spring garden where the flowers can speak. Some of them are quite rude to her. Elsewhere in the garden, she meets the Red Queen, who is now human-sized, and who impresses Alice with her ability to run at breathtaking speeds.

The Red Queen explains that the entire countryside is laid out in squares, like a gigantic chessboard, and says that Alice will be a queen if she can advance all the way to the eighth rank on the board. Because the White Queen's pawn, Lily, is too young to play, Alice is placed in the second rank in her stead. The Red Queen leaves her with the advice, "Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing – turn out your toes when you walk – and remember who you are!"

Chapter Three. Looking-Glass Insects

Alice finds herself as a passenger on a train that disconcertingly jumps over the third row directly into the fourth (pawns can advance two spaces on their first move). She arrives in a forest where a gnat teaches her about looking glass insects – creatures part-insect and part-object – such as "Bread-and-butterfly", "Rocking-horsefly", before vanishing.

Continuing her journey, Alice crosses the "wood where things have no names". There she cannot follow the Red Queen's advice – "remember who you are" – and forgets all nouns, including her own name. Together with a fawn, who has also forgotten who or what he is, she makes her way to the other side, where they both remember everything. Realising that he is a fawn, she a human, and that fawns are afraid of humans, he runs off.

Chapter Four. Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Alice meeting Tweedledum (centre) and Tweedledee (right)

The Red King dreaming

The Sheep

Alice meets Humpty Dumpty

The White Knight

Alice arrives for her banquet

Alice follows a signpost pointing to the house of the twin brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee, names familiar from the nursery rhyme, which she recites:

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee
    Agreed to have a battle;
  For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
    Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
  Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
    As black as a tar-barrel;
  Which frightened both the heroes so,
    They quite forgot their quarrel.

The brothers insist that Tweedledee should now recite to her – and they choose the longest poem they know: "The Walrus and the Carpenter". Its eighteen stanzas include

  "The time has come," the Walrus said,
    "To talk of many things:
  Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax
    Of cabbages, and kings
  And why the sea is boiling hot
    And whether pigs have wings".

A noise that Alice mistakes for the roaring of a wild beast is heard. It is the snoring of the Red King – sleeping under a nearby tree. The brothers provoke her with idle philosophical banter to the effect that she is merely an imaginary figure in the Red King's dreams and will vanish when he wakes. The brothers begin suiting up for their battle, only to be frightened away by an enormous crow, as the nursery rhyme about them predicts.

Chapter Five. Wool and Water

Alice next meets the White Queen, who is absent-minded but can remember future events before they have happened: "That's the effect of living backwards ... it always makes one a little giddy at first". She advises Alice to practise believing impossibilities: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast".

Alice and the White Queen advance into the chessboard's fifth rank by crossing over a brook together, but at the moment of the crossing, the Queen suddenly becomes a talking Sheep in a small shop. Alice soon finds herself on water, struggling to handle the oars of a small rowing boat; the Sheep annoys her by shouting about "crabs" and "feathers". After rowing back to the shop Alice finds trees growing in it, alongside a little brook – "Well, this is the very queerest shop I ever saw!"

Chapter Six. Humpty Dumpty

After crossing the brook into the sixth rank, Alice encounters the giant egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty, sitting on a wall. He is celebrating his un-birthday, which he explains is one of the 364 days of the year when one might get un-birthday presents. He is quite rude to Alice but provides her with translations of the strange terms in "Jabberwocky". In the process, he introduces her to the concept of portmanteau words: "Well, then, 'mimsy' is 'flimsy and miserable' (there’s another portmanteau for you). And a 'borogove' is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round – something like a live mop". Just after she has parted company with him he has a great fall: "a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end".

Chapter Seven. The Lion and the Unicorn

All the king's horses and all the king's men come to Humpty Dumpty's assistance, and are accompanied by the White King, along with the Lion and the Unicorn. The March Hare and Hatter appear in the guise of messengers called "Haigha" and "Hatta", whom the White King employs "to come and go. One to come, and one to go".

The nursery rhyme about the Lion and the Unicorn ends: "Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town". They are starting on the plum-cake when a deafening noise of drumming is heard.

Chapter Eight. "It's My Own Invention"

Alarmed by the noise, Alice crosses another brook, reaching the seventh rank and the forested territory of the Red Knight, who seeks to capture the white pawn – Alice – until the White Knight comes to her rescue, though repeatedly falling off his horse. He is an inveterate inventor of useless things: "Yes, it's a very good bee-hive," the Knight said in a discontented tone, "one of the best kind. But not a single bee has come near it yet. And the other thing is a mouse-trap. I suppose the mice keep the bees out – or the bees keep the mice out, I don't know which". Escorting Alice through the forest towards the final brook-crossing, the Knight recites "Haddocks' Eyes", a poem of his own composition. Carroll writes in this chapter:

Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday – the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight – the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her – the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet.

Chapter Nine. Queen Alice

Bidding farewell to the White Knight, Alice steps across the last brook, and is automatically a queen; a golden crown has materialised on her head. She is joined by the White and Red Queens, who confuse her by using word play to thwart her attempts at logical discussion. They then invite each other to a party that will be hosted by Alice – of which Alice herself has had no prior knowledge. They fall asleep, each resting on one of Alice's shoulders, before sliding to the ground.

Alice arrives at an arched doorway over which are the words "Queen Alice" in large letters. She goes in and finds her banquet already in progress. There are three chairs at the head of the table; the Red and White Queens are seated in two of them; the middle one is empty and Alice sits in it. She attempts a speech of thanks to her guests but the banquet becomes chaotic. Crying "I can't stand this any longer!" Alice jumps up and seizes the table-cloth, pulls it and plates, dishes, guests, and candles come crashing down together in a heap on the floor. She blames the Red Queen for everything:

"And as for you," she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen, whom she considered as the cause of all the mischief – but the Queen was no longer at her side – she had suddenly dwindled down to the size of a little doll, and was now on the table, merrily running round and round after her own shawl, which was trailing behind her. At any other time, Alice would have felt surprised at this, but she was far too much excited to be surprised at anything now. "As for you," she repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, "I'll shake you into a kitten, that I will!"

Chapter Ten. Shaking

Alice seizes the Red Queen and begins shaking her ...

Chapters Eleven. Waking; and Twelve. Which Dreamed It?

... and awakes in her armchair to find herself holding Kitty, who, she concludes, has been the Red Queen all along, Snowdrop having been the White Queen. Alice then recalls the speculation of Tweedledum and Tweedledee that everything may have been a dream of the Red King. "He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream, too!" Carroll leaves the reader with the question, "Which do you think it was?"

Themes

Chess

Carroll's diagram of the story as a chess game

The composition, according to Glen Downey

Whereas the first Alice novel has playing cards as a theme, Through the Looking-Glass uses chess; most of the main characters are represented by chess pieces, Alice being a pawn. The looking-glass world consists of square fields divided by brooks or streams, and the crossing of each brook signifies a change in scene, Alice advancing one square.

At the beginning of the book Carroll provides and explains a chess composition with descriptive notation, corresponding to the events of the story. Although the piece movements follow the rules of chess, other basic rules are ignored: one player (White) makes several consecutive moves while the (Red) opponent's moves are skipped, and a late check (12... Qe8+) is left undealt with. Carroll also explains that certain items listed in the composition do not have corresponding piece moves but simply refer to the story, e.g. the "castling of the three Queens, which is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace".

An extensive treatment of the chess motif in Carroll's novel was made by Glen Downey in his master's thesis, later expanded and incorporated into his dissertation on the use of chess as a device in Victorian fiction. In the former piece, Downey gave the composition's moves in algebraic notation: 1... Qh5 2. d4 3. Qc4 4. Qc5 5. d5 6. Qf8 7. d6 8. Qc8 9. d7 Ne7+ 10. Nxe7 11. Nf5 12. d8=Q Qe8+ 13. Qa6 14. Qxe8#. In the latter piece, Downey treated the 21 items in the composition sequentially, identifying the above 16 coherent chess moves, and another five items as "non-moves" or pure story descriptors, according to Carroll's qualification.

Poems and songs

The Walrus and the Carpenter

• "Introduction" (prelude; "Child of the pure unclouded brow…")
• "Jabberwocky"
• "Tweedledum and Tweedledee"
• "The Walrus and the Carpenter"
• "Humpty Dumpty"
• "The Lion and the Unicorn"
• The White Knight's ballad, "A-sitting on a Gate"
• The Red Queen's lullaby, "Hush-a-by lady, in Alice's lap…"
• "To the Looking-Glass World it was Alice that Said…"
• The White Queen's riddle, "First, the fish must be caught..."
• "A boat beneath a sunny sky" (postlude; acrostic poem in which putting the beginning letters of each line spell Alice Pleasance Liddell, the girl after whom the book's Alice is named.)

Parody, caricature and coinages

The White Knight's ballad

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland contains several parodies of Victorian poetry, but in Through the Looking-Glass there is only one: the White Knight’s ballad, described by the literary critic Harold Bloom as "a superb and loving parody of Wordsworth's great crisis-poem 'Resolution and Independence'". Beverly Lyon Clark, in a study of Carroll's verse, writes that the ballad also contains echoes of Wordsworth's "The Thorn" and Thomas Moore's "My Heart and Lute".

Walter Scott's "Bonny Dundee" is clearly the basis for "To the Looking-Glass World it was Alice that Said", but Carroll simply uses its form and metre rather than parodying it. "The Walrus and the Carpenter" employs the rhyme-scheme and metre of Thomas Hood's ballad "The Dream of Eugene Aram", but is not a parody of it. Carroll commented, "I had no particular poem in mind. The metre is a common one, and I don’t think 'Eugene Aram' suggested it more than the many other poems I have read in the same metre".

As in the earlier book, some of the characters incorporate elements of real people whom the Liddell sisters would have known. The Red Queen (described by the Rose as "one of the kind that has nine spikes") is based on their governess, Miss Prickett, known to them as "Pricks". The White Knight contains elements of Carroll himself and of a college friend, Augustus Vernon Harcourt, although Bloom also finds echoes of "the kindly, heroic, and benignly mad Don Quixote". In a 1933 essay Shane Leslie suggests that Carroll was satirising the Oxford Movement in Through the Looking Glass, Tweedledum and Tweedledee representing High Church and Low Church respectively. In Leslie's hypothesis there are other Oxonian and church references, the Sheep, the White Queen and the White King drawing, respectively, on Edward Pusey, J. H. Newman and Benjamin Jowett, the White and Red Knights representing Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce and the Jabberwock the Papacy.

Like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the book contains many phrases that became common currency. Here they include "cabbages and kings", "jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day", "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast", "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean", "un-birthday presents", "portmanteau words", "Anglo-Saxon attitudes" and "as large as life and twice as natural".

Adaptations

Maidie Andrews as Alice in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, West End, Christmas season 1903–04

Most stage and screen adaptations of the Lewis Carroll novels concentrate on the more familiar Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although many of them import characters from Through the Looking-Glass. Through the Looking Glass has been adapted at least twice for the theatre. George Grossmith, Jr presented a version at the New Theatre in 1903. In 1954 a stage adaptation by Felicity Douglas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, was presented at the Prince's Theatre, London, with a cast including Michael Denison (Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty), Binnie Hale (Red Queen), Griffith Jones (Tweedledum and Red Knight), Carol Marsh (Alice) and Margaret Rutherford (White Queen).

A musical adaptation for American television in 1966 had a book by Albert Simmons, music by Mark Charlap and lyrics by Elsie Simmons. The cast included Nanette Fabray (White Queen), Agnes Moorehead (Red Queen), Ricardo Montalban (White King), Robert Coote (Red King), Jimmy Durante (Humpty Dumpty), Jack Palance (the Jabberwock) and the Smothers Brothers (Tweedledum and Tweedledee). An adaptation for BBC television in 1973 featured Sarah Sutton (Alice), Brenda Bruce (White Queen), Richard Pearson (White King), Judy Parfitt (Red Queen), Geoffrey Bayldon (White Knight) and Freddie Jones (Humpty Dumpty). Alice Through the Looking Glass (1987) is an animated TV film starring Janet Waldo as the voice of Alice and The Red Queen, as well as the voices of Mr. T as the Jabberwock, Jonathan Winters, and Phyllis Diller.

A 1998 television version featured Kate Beckinsale (Alice), Penelope Wilton (White Queen), Geoffrey Palmer (White King), Siân Phillips (Red Queen) and Desmond Barrit (Humpty Dumpty). A 2016 film with the title Alice Through the Looking Glass uses some of Carroll's characters but the plot is nothing to do with the novel.

A dramatised audio-recorded version, directed by Douglas Cleverdon, was released in 1959 by Argo Records. The book is narrated by Margaretta Scott, starring Jane Asher as Alice, along with Frank Duncan, Tony Church, Norman Shelley and Carleton Hobbs. BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation by Stephen Wyatt on 22 December 2011. It featured by Julian Rhind-Tutt, as Carroll, both as narrator and an active character in the story. Other actors included Lauren Mote (Alice), Carole Boyd (Red Queen), Sally Phillips (White Queen), Nicholas Parsons (Humpty Dumpty), Alistair McGowan (Tweedledum & Tweedledee), and John Rowe (White Knight).

Translations

Through the Looking Glass has been published in many languages, including Afrikaans, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Russian. In French, Tweedledee and Tweedledum have been rendered as "Bonnet-Blanc" and "Blanc-Bonnet" and Humpty Dumpty as "Gros-Coco". The Rocking-horse-fly becomes La Mouche-à-chevaux-de-bois. In French and German the opening lines of "Jabberwocky":

"Jabberwocky"

     'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
     Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
     All mimsy were the borogoves
     And the mome raths outgrabe.

become in French, in De l'autre côté du miroir:

     Il était grilheure; les slictueux toves
     Gyraient sur l'alloinde et vriblaient:
     Tout flivoreux allaient les borogoves;
     Les verchons fourgus bourniflaient

and in German, in Alice hinter den Spiegeln:

     Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
     Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
     Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
     Die mohmen Rath' ausgraben

Reception

Critical response was highly favourable. The Pall Mall Gazette singled out "Jabberwocky": "what pleases us most is the stanza with which the ballad begins and ends. Anything more affecting than those lines we rarely meet in the poetry of our day. Once admitted to memory, they will for ever maintain a place there". As to the book as a whole the paper judged it almost up to the standard of its predecessor – "there is not much to choose between them". Tenniel too was praised: "Those who remember his picture of the grin of the Cheshire Cat (not the cat, but the grin) will find a similar exercise of his skill in the woodcut representing Alice as she fades through the looking-glass".

The Illustrated London News found the book "quite as rich in humorous whims of fantasy, quite as laughable in its queer incidents, as lovable for its pleasant spirit and graceful manner" as its predecessor:

Humpty Dumpty and that inseparable pair of twins named Tweedledum and Tweedledee, are irresistibly comical, and so are the Lion and the Unicorn fighting for the Crown. Mr. Tenniel's designs, it need scarcely be said, are so good that the little volume would be worth buying for their sake alone.

The Globe commented, "to write good nonsense is as difficult as to write good sense, but it must be more difficult, as there are very few who deal in the commodity so successfully as Mr Carroll". The Examiner found the sequel not quite as good as the original but "quite good enough to delight every sensible reader of any age", It praised the "wit and humour that all children can appreciate, and grown folks ought as thoroughly to enjoy". The Times said, "The nonsense almost equals that of its predecessor, and is far more charming than half the literature bought and sold as solid sense. The charm of it is that it answers to its name; there is literally no sense in it, no lurking moral, no covert satire, no meaning, so far as we read it, of any sort whatever; it is at once the lightest and the brightest, and the most utter nonsense." The reviewer in a New York newspaper, The Independent, wrote, "we know no higher praise than to say it is the equal of that charming juvenile Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ... Lewis Carroll has succeeded in giving to his books a purity, a daintiness, and an absolute adaptation to child-wants which are remarkable. Tenniel's illustrations, too, are exquisitely drawn".

Among more recent comments on the book, Daniel Hahn in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (2015) writes that sentimentality plays a larger part in Through the Looking Glass than in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He instances Alice’s encounter with the Fawn in the wood and the description of her picking scented rushes while in the Sheep’s boat. In Hahn's view, Alice's farewell to the White Knight has emotional overtones often thought to represent Carroll's sundering from Alice Liddell as she grows up.

Hahn also comments on the levels of threatened violence in the book. "Jabberwocky" introduces a note of real horror; and there is a frequent threat of death or dissolution. The oysters in "The Walrus and The Carpenter" are all eaten "despite (or perhaps because of) their childlike innocence"; and Alice is made to fear that she will disappear if she is in the Red King's dream and he wakes up.

Notes, references and sources

Sources

• Amor, Anne Clark (1979). Lewis Carroll, A Biography. London: Dent. ISBN 0-46-004302-1.
• Bakewell, Michael (1996). Lewis Carroll: A Biography. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0-43-404579-9.
• Batey, Mavis (1980). Alice's Adventures in Oxford. London: Pitkin. OCLC 1193354915.
• Batey, Mavis (1991). The Adventures of Alice: The Story Behind the Stories Lewis Carroll Told. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-33-356408-1.
• Bloom, Harold (1987). "Introduction". In Harold Bloom (ed.). Lewis Carroll. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 0-87-754689-4.
• Carroll, Lewis (1998) [1871]. "Through the Looking-Glass". Alice: A Special Centenary Edition. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-72272-8.
• Carroll, Lewis (2004). De l'autre côté du miroir. Paris: Ebooks libres et gratuits. OCLC 1352019576.
• Clark, Beverly Lyon (1987). "Carroll's Well-Versed Narrative". In Harold Bloom (ed.). Lewis Carroll. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 0-87-754689-4.
• Cohen, Morton N. (2015) [1995]. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-44-728613-4.
• Cohen, Morton N.; Anita Gandolfo (1987). Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52-125602-X.
• Elwyn Jones, Jo; J. Francis Gladstone (1998). The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll's Alice Books. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-81-474245-9.
• Fowler, H. W. (1926). A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OCLC 1414849200.
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External links

• Quotations related to Through the Looking-Glass at Wikiquote
• Media related to Through the Looking-Glass at Wikimedia Commons
• A catalogue of illustrated editions of the Alice books from 1899 to 2009
• [1] 150 anniversary web site

Online texts

• The full text of Through the Looking-Glass at Wikisource
• Through the Looking-Glass at Standard Ebooks
• Through the Looking-Glass at Project Gutenberg
• Through the Looking-Glass public domain audiobook at LibriVox