Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, published in 1871, is a sequel to his 1865 classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The full title is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There but it’s also known as Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

This time young Alice passes through a mirror into the looking-glass world in which everything is back-to-front, but in extremely complex ways. She also finds herself participating in a game of chess, of a sort. She meets chess pieces that have come to life and finds that in this world even time is back-to-front.

Lewis Carroll was of course the pen-name of the great Victorian mathematician and logician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898). Apart from being a charming children’s nonsense book this book is also an extraordinarily clever, devious and intricate set of games with both logic and language.

This is one of those children’s books that really does delight children but it delights adults even more. There are so many layers here that only an adult could appreciate.

Alice finds herself in a world in which logic is turned on its head to create nonsense but the nonsense is in its own way strictly logical. Bizarre games are played with language but again the nonsense that results from this does actually follow logical rules. If you push logic far enough it becomes both logical and illogical.

And Alice’s adventure in the looking-glass world is a game of chess, of sorts.

The games played with time are amusing and on the surface silly but it fact they’re the sorts of games you’ll find in serious works of science fiction. Through the Looking-Glass is a children’s fantasy book but it really is a science fiction novel as well.

The book includes several of Lewis Carroll’s best-known poems, such as Jabberwocky. He had a knack for writing nonsense verse that isn’t mere gibberish. It actually hangs together as a poem. He’s playing games with words and sounds and names but they’re not purely random games. Everything in this novel is intricately thought out.

Mirrors and mirror images and pairs recur throughout the story.

The character of Alice may have been based very loosely on Alice Liddell, or perhaps one of her sisters. The original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written to entertain the girls but Dodgson quickly realised that the story had commercial potential and the heroine’s character may have been altered somewhat to enhance the story.

It is important not to try to analyse this book in terms of anachronistic modern literary theories or ideologies. It’s also important not to try to impose silly Freudian readings on to it, Freudianism being much greater nonsense than anything Dodgson comes up with in the novel with the difference that Dodgson’s nonsense stuff at least obeys logical rules.

That’s not to say that this is a mere child’s tale. There’s clearly plenty of symbolism, but it’s not Freudian symbolism (or Jungian symbolism). Dodgson was a product of the 19th century. As an educated man he obviously had a familiarity with classical literature and mythology. And he was a High Church Anglican. And a mathematician. If such a man wanted to add symbolism to his story these are the sources on which he would have drawn.

Both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are must-read books, in fact they’re among the greatest treasures of English literature. They revolutionised children’s literature but they are much more more than children’s books. Very highly recommended.

The very cheap Wordsworth Classics paperback edition includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as well, and the wonderful original illustrations by John Tenniel.