Through the Looking Glass

Summary

Through the Looking Glass is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and was published seven years after it in 1872. The same basic elements recur (a lack of moral certainty driving the story, it being a dream for a dream's sake). Alice, continuing her slumber's journey, walks through a mirror into the Looking-Glass House. Already reality is twisted and nothing can be trusted. Here she meets a sequence of characters now familiar to most: Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Walrus being particularly famous examples. The popular and linguistically playful poem "Jabberwocky" is found here although it is now often seen as a separate work which uses blended words to create a meaning derived almost wholly from suggestion. The end of the story (Alice shaking the red queen from a chess board into a kitten) removes the sense of absurdity and disconnectedness from real life since we find that Alice had fallen asleep playing with differently coloured cats.

Table of contents

• Through the Looking-Glass
• The Garden of Live Flowers
• Looking-Glass Insects
• Tweedledum and Tweedledee
• Wool and Water
• Humpty Dumpty
• The Lion and the Unicorn
• `It's My Own Invention'
• Queen Alice
• Shaking
• Waking
• Which Dreamed It?

More by Lewis Carroll

• Sylvie and Bruno
• Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
• Alice in Wonderland
• Bruno's Revenge
• Games and Puzzles

Other Fiction classics

• Lady Chatterley's Lover — D.H. Lawrence
• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Billy Budd — Herman Melville
• Ulysses — James Joyce
• Dubliners — James Joyce
• Little Women — Louisa M. Alcott