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".

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

thumb|upright|Carroll, 1863 photograph|alt=Clean-shaven white man with medium-length dark hair, seated

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".

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had grown from stories Carroll improvised for Alice Liddell and her sisters, the daughters of his Oxford 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, in 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 and nor was 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

thumb|upright=0.5|[[John Tenniel: self-portrait|alt=Middle-aged white man with full head of grey hair and large grey walrus moustache]]

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 & Co, 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

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 Sotheby's offered for sale a batch of galley proofs with handwritten revisions and a note directing the printer to take the section out of the book.

! scope="col"! scope="col"<th width="25%">|White Pawns

! scope="col" ! scope="col"<th width="25%">|Red Pawns

! scope="col" ! scope="col"<th width="25%">|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 progresses across a chessboard-like landscape in which the squares are separated by small brooks. Each time she steps across a brook to a new square in Chapters Three to Nine she finds herself meeting new characters in a self-contained story.

thumb|Alice lifts the White King from the floor to the table|alt=Girl's hand holding a chess piece, which is pulling horrified faces at being pulled through the air by an invisible hand

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 Kitty about the game of chess and then 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. 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 jumps over the third row directly into the fourth. She arrives in a forest where a gnat teaches her about looking glass insects such as the "Bread-and-butterfly" and "Rocking-horsefly". It then vanishes.

Alice crosses the "wood where things have no names". There she cannot follow the Red Queen's advice – "remember who you are" – and forgets 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. The fawn bounds away.

Chapter Four. Tweedledum and Tweedledee

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

<poem>

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.</poem>

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:

<poem>

"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". </poem>

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 upset her by saying that she is merely an imaginary figure in the Red King's dreams and will vanish when he wakes. The brothers begin equipping themselves for their battle, but are frightened away by the monstrous crow.

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&nbsp;... 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)". 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 the 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 her, but the White Knight comes to her rescue, though repeatedly falling off his horse. He is an inveterate inventor of useless things. Escorting Alice through the forest towards the final brook-crossing, he recites "A-sitting on a Gate", a poem of his own composition. Carroll writes in this chapter:

Chapter Nine. Queen Alice

Bidding farewell to the White Knight, Alice steps across the last brook, and is automatically a queen;

Through the Looking Glass has been adapted at least four times for the theatre. George Grossmith Jr presented a version at the New Theatre in 1903. Nancy Price adapted and presented the piece at the Little Theatre in 1935, and revived it for the Christmas seasons of the next three years. The cast included Frith Banbury (Unicorn), Ernest Butcher (Tweedledee), Michael Martin Harvey (White Knight), Esmé Percy (Humpty Dumpty) and Joyce Redman (Tiger Lily). In 1954 a stage adaptation by Felicity Douglas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, was presented at the Prince's Theatre 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). In 2001 Adrian Mitchell's adaptation, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. An almost complete adaptation of both of Carroll's novels, Through the Looking-Glass was adapted in act 2. The cast included Katherine Heath (Alice Liddell/Alice), Sarah Redmond (Tiger Lily), Jamie Golding (Tweedledum), Adam Sims (Tweedledee), Robert Howell (Walrus) and Chris Lamer (Carpenter).

A 2016 film titled Alice Through the Looking Glass uses some of the novel's characters, but the plot is unrelated to it.

Radio

The first full-cast sound radio version of the book was transmitted on BBC Radio in 1944, with a cast including Esmé Percy, Leslie French and Eric Maturin. A further radio version was broadcast as a five-part serial in 1948, with Angela Glynne as Alice, Derek McCulloch as narrator and a cast including Vivienne Chatterton (White Queen), Mary O'Farrell (Red Queen), Carleton Hobbs (Tweedledum and Lion), Norman Shelley (Gnat), Marjorie Westbury (Fawn) and Richard Goolden (White Knight).

A 1963 adaptation for BBC Network Three had a cast including Peter Sallis (Tweedledee), Peter Pratt (White King) and Geoffrey Bayldon (White Knight). A further five-part adaptation was broadcast on the Home Service in 1964 with Prunella Scales as Alice. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new adaptation in December 2012, featuring Julian Rhind-Tutt as Carroll and Lauren Mote (Alice), Carole Boyd (Red Queen), Sally Phillips (White Queen), Nicholas Parsons (Humpty Dumpty), Alistair McGowan (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) and John Rowe (White Knight).

Television

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 Montalbán (White King), Robert Coote (Red King), Jimmy Durante (Humpty Dumpty), Jack Palance (the Jabberwock) and the Smothers Brothers (Tweedledum and Tweedledee). This version of Looking-Glass did not follow Carroll's original plot, using the characters as a jumping off point for a Wizard of Oz style quest narrative.

Some characters from Through the Looking Glass featured in a conflation of both books on BBC Television in 1960, but the first British television adaptation of Through the Looking Glass was in 1973, featuring Sarah Sutton (Alice), Brenda Bruce (White Queen), Richard Pearson (White King), Judy Parfitt (Red Queen), Geoffrey Bayldon (White Knight) and Freddie Jones (Humpty Dumpty).

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).

Other

A dramatised audio 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. The book has been the basis of musical compositions. Deems Taylor wrote an orchestral suite in 1919 with one of the novel's episodes represented in each of its five movements. Alfred Reynolds composed another orchestral suite based on the book in 1947.

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 "" and "" and Humpty Dumpty as "". The Rocking-horse-fly becomes . The opening lines of "Jabberwocky":

thumb|upright=0.85|"Jabberwocky"|alt=Huge monster towering over small human figure who is brandishing a sword at the monster

<poem>

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome raths outgrabe.</poem>

become in French (present tense):

<poem>

</poem>

and in German, in the earliest of several translations:<poem>

</poem>

Reception and legacy

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:

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 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&nbsp;... 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. Douglas Adams, in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, borrows from the White Queen: "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?" Adams's character Mr Prosser shares Alice's concern about being a mere figment of someone else's dream: "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it". A disembodied quiet voice talks to Adams's Zaphod Beeblebrox in much the same way as the gnat in Through the Looking Glass talks quietly in Alice's ear.

Angus Wilson drew on Through the Looking Glass for the title of his 1956 novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes but otherwise his book has nothing to do with Carroll's story. Another title drawn from Carroll's book is the Red Queen hypothesis – derived from her words to Alice "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" – that to survive, a species must evolve rapidly enough to counter evolutionary changes in ecologically competing species. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature cites the Alice books – not specifically the second – as important influences on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and comments, "The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster recaptures the Alice style more naturally than do most other imitations (though according to Juster, he had never read Alice at the time he wrote it)".

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

  • A catalogue of illustrated editions of the Alice books from 1899 to 2009
  • 150 anniversary website

;Online texts