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= Through_the_Looking-Glass =
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Introduction
======================================================================
'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
======================================================================
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.
'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
===============
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 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:
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. 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 & Co. It was reproduced in full by the British
newspaper 'The Sunday Telegraph' that September, 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.
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 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.
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:
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 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 ... 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; a golden crown materialises on
her head. She is joined by the White and Red Queens, who invite each
other to a party that will be hosted by Alice. The two fall asleep.
Alice arrives at a 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 in a heap. She blames the Red
Queen for everything:
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
======================================================================
'Through the Looking-Glass' builds on the first book's themes of
language, linguistic puzzles and wordplay. The poet W. H. Auden
commented that words in the 'Alice' books "have a life and a will of
their own". Carroll's linguistic games parody the incoherence of
real-world institutions and social structures. Like its predecessor,
the book has legalistic elements that convey how systems of order can
appear structured but remain completely arbitrary. As in a symmetrical
chess game, many aspects of the story are mirrored or inverted. Cause
and effect are often reversed: for example, Alice can only reach the
Red Queen by walking in reverse. 'Through the Looking Glass'
juxtaposes sense with nonsense and sanity with insanity. The more
consistent rules of 'Through the Looking Glass' cast Alice more
clearly as a child intruding into an adult world, and capable of
seeing through the arbitrary nature of the social structures. The book
pays more attention to the passage of time and has moments of playful
rebellion against the adult world along with melancholy for the coming
end of Alice's childhood: the beginning and end both have themes of
winter and death, linked with the end of childhood.
Chess
=======
Whereas the first 'Alice' novel has playing cards as a theme, 'Through
the Looking-Glass' uses chess; many 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, corresponding to the events of the story. Although the
moves follow the rules of chess, other basic rules are ignored: one
player (White) makes several consecutive moves, and a late check 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".
Poems and songs
=================
* "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 the
beginning letters of each line spell Alice Pleasance Liddell, after
whom the book's Alice is named.)
Parody, caricature and coinages
=================================
'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. Although the rhyme scheme
and metre of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" mirror those of Thomas
Hood's ballad "The Dream of Eugene Aram", Carroll is not parodying the
latter; he commented, "The metre is a common one", and said he had no
particular poem in mind.
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, the chemist and inventor 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 in 'Through the
Looking Glass' Carroll was satirising the controversial Oxford
Movement, which sought to align the Church of England more closely
with the Catholic Church, Tweedledum representing "high church"
reformers and Tweedledee representing "low church" opponents of the
movement. 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. The theologian and
novelist Ronald Knox agreed that the Papacy was a target, maintaining
that "impenetrability" - one of Humpty Dumpty's words - was a joke
against the doctrine of papal infallibility.
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".
Stage and cinema
==================
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 three 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).
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).
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":
'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 (present tense):
and in German, in the earliest of several translations:
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' ... 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.
Legacy
========
Although many later writers, including Jean Ingelow, Christina
Rossetti, Charles E. Carryl and E. F. Benson, attempted to follow
Carroll's lead, 'Through the Looking Glass', as opposed to 'Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland', is rarely the identifiable influence.
Lawrence Durrell draws on "Jabberwocky" in his collection of comic
short stories (1966): "You can damn well take a hundred lines,
Dovebasket ... 'In future I must not be such a blasted Borogrove'".
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)".
External links
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*[
https://sites.google.com/site/lewiscarrollillustratedalice/ A
catalogue of illustrated editions of the Alice books from 1899 to
2009]
*[
https://sites.google.com/view/through-the-looking-glass--150/home?fbclid=IwAR2Xiw-gh672HxWJWb5Ihu2g-DM0nkOa32jKWrDg5_ZOwjd9hG3wE3nFkGA
150 anniversary website]
;Online texts
*
*
*
*
License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass
