Fiction · 1871
Through the Looking-Glass
Alice climbs through the drawing-room mirror into a country laid out as a chessboard, where she must cross from pawn to queen past the Red and White Queens, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty and the White Knight. Lewis Carroll published the sequel to Wonderland in December 1871 (dated 1872); it contains “Jabberwocky” and “The Walrus and the Carpenter”.
The book is a chess problem as well as a story: the Dramatis Personæ at the front sets out the pieces, and every move Alice makes is a move on the board, from the second square to the eighth. Its inventions have long outlasted the game — the Jabberwock, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Humpty Dumpty on what a word may be made to mean, the White Knight falling off his horse.
The twelve chapters are given complete, with the closing acrostic.
Contents
- Dramatis Personæ
- Chapter I — Looking-Glass house
- Chapter II — The Garden of Live Flowers
- Chapter III — Looking-Glass Insects
- Chapter IV — Tweedledum and Tweedledee
- Chapter V — Wool and Water
- Chapter VI — Humpty Dumpty
- Chapter VII — The Lion and the Unicorn
- Chapter VIII — “It’s my own Invention”
- Chapter IX — Queen Alice
- Chapter X — Shaking
- Chapter XI — Waking
- Chapter XII — Which Dreamed it?
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Short Classics.
Source mind
About the author
1832–1898 · Victorian
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), mathematician, logician and Anglican deacon, who taught at Christ Church, Oxford, for most of his adult life. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) grew from a story told to the daughters of the college dean on a boating trip in 1862; Through the Looking-Glass followed in 1871, and The Hunting of the Snark in 1876. Under his own name he published works on mathematics and logic. He was also an accomplished early photographer.
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