Through the Looking-Glass
Alice climbs through the mirror over the fireplace into Looking-Glass House, where everything runs backwards, the flowers talk, and the whole country is a giant game of chess. Meet Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty and the White Knight. By Lewis Carroll (1871). A public-domain classic.
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How it begins 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. Keep reading →About this story
Alice climbs through the mirror over her fireplace and finds a house where everything runs the wrong way. Outside is a country laid out like a giant chessboard, and she is told that if she keeps going she can become a queen. Along the way she meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, and the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) published this sequel in 1871, six years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is a little more orderly and a little sadder than the first book, because the chess game gives it a plan and Alice is a year older. “Jabberwocky” is full of invented words, and several of them, such as chortle, are now in ordinary English.
- Themes
- Reversal, time, growing up, language
- Good for
- Anyone who has read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and lovers of word games
- Worth noticing
- How the chess rules shape what happens to Alice, square by square.
Chapters
- 1Looking-Glass house14 min · 16 Oct
- 2The Garden of Live Flowers13 min · 16 Oct
- 3Looking-Glass Insects13 min · 16 Oct
- 4Tweedledum and Tweedledee13 min · 16 Oct
- 5Wool and Water14 min · 16 Oct
- 6Humpty Dumpty13 min · 16 Oct
- 7The Lion and the Unicorn12 min · 16 Oct
- 8“It’s my own Invention”18 min · 16 Oct
- 9Queen Alice18 min · 16 Oct
- 10Shaking, Waking, and Which Dreamed It?4 min · 16 Oct