Through the Looking-Glass

By Lewis Carroll

Alice's second adventure takes her through the looking-glass to a place even curiouser than Wonderland. She finds herself caught up in the great looking-glass chess game and sets off to become a queen. It isn't as easy as she expects: at every step she is hindered by nonsense characters who crop up and insist on reciting poems. Some of these poems, such as 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' and 'Jabberwocky', are as famous as the Alice stories themselves.

Gloriously illustrated with the original line drawings by John Tenniel, plates coloured by John Macfarlane, a ribbon marker and a foreword by Roald Dahl Funny Prize-winner Philip Ardagh, this beautiful hardback Macmillan Classics edition of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, which was first published by Macmillan in 1871, is a truly special gift to treasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781447292951

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in 1871. Considered a master of the genre of literary nonsense, he is renowned for his ingenious wordplay and sense of logic, and his highly original vision.

Book preview

First published by Macmillan in 1872, Alice’s second adventure in Wonderland has become one of the world’s most loved books.

Alice’s second adventure takes her through the looking-glass to a place even curiouser than Wonderland. She finds herself caught up in the great looking-glass chess game and sets off to become a queen. It isn’t as easy as she expects: at every step she is hindered by nonsense characters who insist on reciting poems.

‘I began dealing with your house with full confidence in it in every way – and that confidence is undiminished’

Carroll writes to Alexander Macmillan in April 1871

Child of the pure unclouded brow

And dreaming eyes of wonder!

Though time be fleet, and I and thou

Are half a life asunder,

Thy loving smile will surely hail

The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

I have not seen thy sunny face,

Nor heard thy silver laughter;

No thought of me shall find a place

In thy young life’s hereafter—

Enough that now thou wilt not fail

To listen to my fairy-tale.

A tale begun in other days,

When summer suns were glowing—

A simple chime, that served to time

The rhythm of our rowing—

Whose echoes live in memory yet,

Though envious years would say ‘forget.’

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,

With bitter tidings laden,

Shall summon to unwelcome bed

A melancholy maiden!

We are but older children, dear,

Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Without, the frost, the blinding snow,

The storm-winds moody madness—

Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow

And childhood’s nest of gladness.

The magic words shall hold thee fast:

Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.

And though the shadow of a sigh

May tremble through the story,

For ‘happy summer days’ gone by,

And vanish’d summer glory—

It shall not touch with breath of bale

The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

Lewis Carroll

White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.

Preface

As the chess problem, given on a previous page, has puzzled some of my readers, it may be well to explain that it is correctly worked out, so far as the moves are concerned. The alternation of Red and White is perhaps not so strictly observed as it might be, and the castling of the three Queens is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace: but the check of the White King at move 6, the capture of the Red Knight at move 7, and the final checkmate of the Red King, will be found, by any one who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game.

The new words, in the poem Jabberwocky (see page 19) have given rise to some differences of opinion as to their pronunciation: so it may be well to give instructions on that point also. Pronounce slithy as if it were the two words sly, the: make the ‘g’ hard in gyre and gimble: and pronounce rath to rhyme with bath.

Christmas, 1896

Contents

Foreword

1 Looking-Glass House

2 The Garden of Live Flowers

3 Looking-Glass Insects

4 Tweedledum and Tweedledee

5 Wool and Water

6 Humpty Dumpty

7 The Lion and the Unicorn

8 It’s My Own Invention.

9 Queen Alice

10 Shaking

11 Waking

12 Which Dreamed It?

Christmas Greetings (From a Fairy to a Child.)

About the Author

Foreword

Through The Looking-Glass is the sequel to the wildly successful Alice in Wonderland, published seven years earlier in 1865. Some have argued that it lacks the freshness and spontaneity of the original but, then again, Wonderland was a hard act to follow. Had the author Lewis Carroll’s only Alice adventure been Through the Looking-Glass, it would probably have been better appreciated for the comic masterpiece that it most certainly is.

The premise is a simple one. Alice finds herself up on the mantelpiece above the fireplace – not quite sure how she got there – and steps through the mirror (looking-glass) above it, which melts away like a silver mist. She finds herself in a mirror-image of the room she’s just left, except that, for example, the clock has a human face grinning back at her. Now, her further adventures begin.

Possibly one of the most famous sequences to come out of Through The Looking-Glass is not part of the actual action but a nonsense poem Alice finds written in back-to-front writing, requiring her to hold it up to a mirror to read. This is Jabberwocky, and in it Carroll takes the use of nonsense words to a whole new level, never achieved before or since.

Alice’s meeting with Tweedledum and Tweedledee has also passed into British folklore, so much so that many people today assume that they’re Carroll’s creation. In fact, they existed as characters in a much earlier – but generally forgotten – nursery song but, with the help of John Tenniel’s extraordinary illustrations, have become synonymous with Alice. Carroll describes them as little men looking so exactly like a couple of great [big] schoolboys. Tenniel drew them as round as a pair of Christmas puddings.

Much of the action in Through the Looking-Glass surrounds the rivalry between the red and white queen on a giant chessboard in which Alice finds herself, both literally and metaphorically, a pawn. In the Victorian world of constraint and rules of etiquette, there was much one couldn’t do. As a child and a female, Alice has even fewer options in society, flagged up in this back-to-front world. Life, like chess, has its own set of rules where even a queen can be prisoner.

But, first and foremost, Through the Looking-Glass is a joyous piece of writing. Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), an eminent mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford. He loved puzzles, trickery and wordplay and his sentences are as inventive, ingenious and subversive as the ridiculous plots they unfold.

It’s Tweedledee who recites the now-infamous poem The Walrus and the Carpenter, the opening verse of which neatly sums up the back-to-front, upside-down, skewiff world Alice finds herself in:

The sun was shining on the sea,

Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

The billows smooth and bright –

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.

Welcome to Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Philip Ardagh

1

Looking-Glass House

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it:—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn’t have had any hand in the mischief.

The way Dinah washed her children’s faces was this: first she held the poor thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw she rubbed its face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose: and just now, as I said, she was hard at work on the white kitten, which was lying quite still and trying to purr—no doubt feeling that it was all meant for its good.

But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon, and so, while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been trying to wind up, and had been rolling it up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it was, spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle.

Oh, you wicked wicked little thing! cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace. "Really, Dinah ought to have taught you better manners! You ought, Dinah, you know you ought!" she added, looking reproachfully at the old cat, and speaking in as cross a voice as she could—manage and then she scrambled back into the arm-chair, taking the kitten and worsted