The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

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Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (also known as Alice through the Looking-Glass or simply Through the Looking-Glass) is a novel by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just like a reflection, everything is reversed, including logic.

The ‘wrong-way-round idea’ dominates the book because this kind of game was a favorite of Carroll’s. He liked to write letters in mirror-writing, drew pictures which changed into different ones when held upside down, and he also liked to play his musical boxes backward. Some people think that this has something to do with his left-handedness and the asymmetry of his body. Carroll considered having several pages of the book actually printed in reverse, so the reader would have to hold them up to a looking-glass to read, but in the end, this proved to be too expensive and troublesome, and only the first stanza of ‘Jabberwocky’ was reversed.

People who have never read Carroll's Alice books are usually familiar with them through their various adaptations. However, many of these adaptations, such as Walt Disney's 1951 film Alice in Wonderland, take elements from both books and combine them into one story, giving the impression that the books are essentially the same. However, the two books are very different.

Through the Looking-Glass is a more complex book which focuses on the end of Alice's childhood and innocence. It is an exploration of the underlying rules that govern our world and shows the process of growing up as a struggle to comprehend these rules. It also questions exactly where these rules come from and the nature of reality.

Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to entertain his young friend Alice Liddell and her siblings on a boating trip. In the six years between the publication of Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll taught Alice to play chess, which led to the game becoming a primary symbol in the sequel.

Title

The title of the book was much discussed by Carroll. The working title of Alice’s new adventures was ‘Looking-Glass House’. It evolved to ‘Behind the Looking-Glass, and what Alice saw there’, which Carroll mentioned in a diary entry from January 1869.

In 1870 a specimen title page was produced that mentioned “Looking-Glass House, and What Alice Saw There”. Macmillan (publisher) wrote to Carroll in March 1870: “as to the main title I decidedly prefer the first form of words: “Behind the Looking Glass.” 'Looking-Glass World' is too specific.”, and later responded to another letter of Carroll: “'Through' is just the word – you’ll never beat it.”

Eventually, Carroll’s friend Henry Liddon suggested the final title ‘Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There’.

In a letter to his publisher, dating March 19, 1875, Carroll wrote that he had “another” idea for the title, namely “Jabberwocky and Other Mysteries, Being the Book That Alice Found in Her Trip Through the Looking-Glass”. He wanted everything to be in reverse printing, except ‘Jabberwocky’.

Symbolism

The themes and settings of Through the Looking-Glass make it a mirror image of Wonderland: the first book begins outdoors, in the warm month of May (May 4) uses frequent changes in size as a plot device, and draws on the imagery of playing cards; the second opens indoors on a snowy, wintry night exactly six months later, on November 4 (the day before Guy Fawkes Night), uses frequent changes in time and spatial directions as a plot device and draws on the imagery of chess. In it, there are many mirror themes, including opposites, time running backward, and so on.

The White Queen offers to hire Alice as her lady's maid and to pay her "Twopence a week, and jam every other day." Alice says that she doesn't want any jam today, and the Queen tells her: "You couldn't have it if you did want it. The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day." This is a reference to the rule in Latin that the word iam or jam meaning now in the sense of already or at that time cannot be used to describe now in the present, which is nunc in Latin. Jam is therefore never available today.

Chess



In the six years since he wrote Alice in Wonderland, Carroll had been teaching Alice and her sisters the game of chess. He made up stories to illustrate the moves of the pieces and the rules of the game.

Whereas the first book has the deck of playing cards as a theme, Through the Looking-Glass is based on a game of chess, played on a giant chessboard with fields for squares. Most of the main characters are represented by a chess piece, with Alice being a pawn.

The looking-glass world is divided into sections by brooks or streams, with the crossing of each brook usually signifying a change in the scene, and corresponding to Alice advancing by one square. Furthermore, since the brook-crossings do not always correspond to the beginning and ends of chapters, most editions of the book visually represent the crossings by breaking the text with several lines of asterisks ( * * * ). The sequence of moves (white and red) is not always followed.

The Wasp in a wig

Carroll decided to suppress a scene involving what was described as "a wasp in a wig" (possibly a play on the commonplace expression "bee in the bonnet"). It has been suggested in a biography by Carroll's nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, that one of the reasons for this suppression was a suggestion from his illustrator, John Tenniel, who wrote in a letter to Carroll dated June 1, 1870:

...I am bound to say that the 'wasp' chapter doesn't interest me in the least, and I can't see my way to a picture. If you want to shorten the book, I can't help thinking – with all submission – that there is your opportunity.

For many years no one had any idea what this missing section was or whether it had survived. In 1974, a document purporting to be the galley proofs of the missing section was sold at Sotheby's; the catalog description read, in part, that "The proofs were bought at the sale of the author's ... personal effects ... Oxford, 1898...". The bid was won by John Fleming, a Manhattan book dealer. He paid the equivalent of $4,000. The contents were subsequently published in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, and is also available as a hardback book The Wasp in a Wig: A Suppressed Episode.

The rediscovered section describes Alice's encounter with a wasp wearing a yellow wig and includes a full previously unpublished poem. If included in the book, it would have followed or been included at the end of, Chapter 8 – the chapter featuring the encounter with the White Knight. The discovery is generally accepted as genuine, but the proofs have yet to receive any physical examination to establish age and authenticity.

Textual revisions

After publishing the story, Carroll kept improving it, just as he did with “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”.

One of the more notable changes is his description of the Red Queen, which was changed from “She’s one of the thorny kind” to “She’s one of the kind that has nine spikes, you know”. This may be a removal of a reference to a person Carroll knew: the governess of the Liddell children, nicknamed ‘Pricks’.

In the 1890s he made major revisions, which were incorporated in the 61st thousand edition of ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, which was published in 1897.

Translations

The story has been translated into 65 languages, and 1,530 different editions were identified all over the world in 2015. The number keeps increasing.

Sources

wikipedia, alice-in-wonderland.net, study.com, britannica.com

Additional Reading:

smithsonianmag.com