Through the Looking-Glass

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, Oxford. It is the sequel to his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which many of the characters were anthropomorphic playing cards. In this second novel the theme is chess. As in the earlier book, the central figure, Alice, enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a large looking-glass (a 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 real).

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. As in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the original illustrations are by John Tenniel.

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", "un-birthday presents", "portmanteau words" and "as large as life and twice as natural".

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 much Victorian literature for children, which was frequently didactic and moralistic, sometimes displaying religious fervour and emphasising human sinfulness. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Carroll's book 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.