Through the Looking Glass

What It's About

Six months after her adventures in Wonderland, Alice climbs through the mirror above the drawing-room fireplace and finds a reversed world laid out like a giant chessboard. She sets out to cross it as a pawn, meeting living flowers, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the White Knight and the bad-tempered Red Queen along the way. The book is both a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and a very different work, more structured and more melancholy. This edition includes John Tenniel's original illustrations, which have shaped how generations of readers picture the characters.

Key Concepts

The mirror and the chess game give the story its logic. Everything is reversed or governed by strict, slightly absurd rules, and Alice must work out how to move within them. Carroll, a trained logician, delights in wordplay, paradox and puzzles about meaning and naming. "Jabberwocky", with its invented words, is one of the most famous nonsense poems in English. Beneath the comedy runs a quieter thread about identity, time and growing up, as Alice grows more assertive and less willing to be pushed around by the adults and officials of this strange world.

About the Author

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), an English writer, mathematician and logician who taught at Christ Church, Oxford, and was also an ordained deacon and a pioneering amateur photographer. His friendship with Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, inspired the Alice stories. His close relationships with young girls, and the photographs he took of them, have been debated by biographers, though no firm evidence of wrongdoing has been found.