Through the Looking-Glass Summary: Alice, Chess and a World in Reverse
What it is about
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There was published in December 1871. It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), written by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. The first book was organised loosely around playing cards. This one is built on chess.
It opens on a snowy November night. Alice is in an armchair by the fire, playing with two kittens, the white Snowdrop and the black Kitty. She talks to Kitty about chess, then starts wondering what the world looks like on the other side of the mirror above the fireplace. She climbs up to the chimney piece, touches the glass and finds she can step straight through it.
The room beyond is her own house reflected. The chess pieces are alive, though still small enough to pick up. A book on the table holds a poem, "Jabberwocky", printed in reverse, which she can only read by holding it up to a mirror. Outside, in a sunny spring garden, the flowers talk and some of them are rude to her. There she meets the Red Queen, now human-sized, who explains that the whole countryside is laid out in squares like a giant chessboard. If Alice can reach the eighth rank, she will be made a queen. Alice is placed on the second rank as a pawn, standing in for the White Queen's pawn, Lily, who is too young to play.
From there the book moves square by square. Small brooks separate the squares, and each crossing drops Alice into a new self-contained episode with new characters. The logic of the place is reversed along with the geography. Running keeps you still. Walking away from something brings you towards it. Nursery rhyme characters are real people with opinions.
The main characters
Alice is the steady centre, polite and curious, trying to apply ordinary sense to a world that has none. The Red Queen is severe and brisk, and startles Alice with her ability to run at tremendous speed. The White Queen is gentle and flustered, absent-minded, and lives backwards, so she remembers things before they happen. Her advice is to practise believing impossibilities: "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast".
Tweedledum and Tweedledee are quarrelsome twins lifted from the nursery rhyme. They recite "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to Alice, all eighteen stanzas, then unsettle her badly by telling her she is only a figure in the sleeping Red King's dream and will vanish when he wakes. Humpty Dumpty sits on his wall, rude and certain he is right about everything, celebrating his un-birthday, which he explains is one of the other 364 days of the year. He also translates the nonsense words of "Jabberwocky" for her and introduces the idea of the portmanteau word, two meanings packed into one. The White Knight is kindly and hopeless at practical things, and sings his ballad "A-sitting on a Gate". John Tenniel illustrated the book, as he had the first.
The themes
Identity runs through the whole book. The Red Queen's parting advice is to remember who you are. In the wood where things have no names, Alice cannot. She forgets her own name and walks through alongside a fawn who has forgotten what he is, and only on the far side does everything come back. The Tweedles' claim about the Red King's dream pushes the same question harder. If Alice is being dreamt, what is she?
Then there is language. Humpty Dumpty bends words to suit himself. "Jabberwocky" invents a vocabulary and trusts the reader to feel the sense of it. The book gave English a set of phrases that outlived their source, including un-birthday presents, jam tomorrow and never jam today, and being as large as life and twice as natural.
Underneath, it is a book about rules. Chess supplies the structure, and the moves carry Alice forward whether she understands them or not. A train jumps her from the third row to the fourth. The White Queen turns into a sheep in a shop at the moment they cross a brook. The world obeys a system, but never the one Alice expects.
The ending
Stop here if you want it fresh. After the run of strange adventures, Alice wakes. The whole journey beyond the mirror has been a dream, as Wonderland was before it.
Why it still matters
Critical opinion has been consistently favourable, placing the book either level with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or just below it. It has been translated widely and adapted repeatedly for stage and screen. It suits readers who enjoy puzzles and wordplay as much as story, and adults often get more from it than children do. The poems alone, "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter", have had long lives of their own.
