Why this book
This slim sequel gave English its most famous nonsense poem, Jabberwocky, and the phrase through the looking-glass itself, shorthand ever since for any world turned inside out and back to front.
The Story
On a snowy afternoon, Alice teases her black kitten about the looking-glass house beyond the parlor mirror. On a whim she climbs onto the mantel, and steps straight through the glass into that mirrored room.
Inside, the room breathes strangely: portraits wink, the clock wears a face, and on the mantel a set of chessmen walk and talk. Alice watches the White King topple, unheard, unseen by the pieces themselves.
On the table Alice finds a book of nonsense verse, its letters mirrored and strange, readable only when held to the glass. It tells of a fearsome Jabberwock and a boy who slays it with a vorpal blade, thrilling, though half the words mean nothing at all.
Curiosity pulls Alice outside into a garden of live flowers. A Tiger-lily and a Rose gossip about her rudely, therefore a haughty Violet joins in, until a stern voice cuts through and the flowers fall silent.
The voice belongs to the Red Queen, a chess piece grown tall and sharp-tongued. She quizzes Alice on manners and geography, therefore Alice, flustered, blurts that she wishes she could be a queen herself.
The Red Queen reveals the whole countryside is one giant chessboard, its fields the squares. If Alice will play the White Queen's pawn and cross all eight squares to the eighth, she may be crowned a queen at the final rank.
To prove the world's strange rules, the Red Queen seizes Alice's hand and they run faster and faster, yet the same tree stays fixed beside them. As Carroll wrote, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
Alone now, Alice boards a train crowded with odd passengers, a Goat, a Beetle, a Gnat the size of a chicken. The Guard insists she is traveling entirely the wrong way, therefore the whole carriage leaps clean over a brook onto the third square.
In the woods beyond, a mournful giant Gnat names Alice the strange insects of this world, the Bread-and-Butterfly, the Rocking-horse-fly, then sighs itself nearly away to nothing, sad that its jokes rarely land.
At a signpost Alice meets exactly two round little men, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, arms linked, finishing each other's sentences. They insist on a formal introduction and a great deal of fuss before they will let her pass.
The brothers recite a long, sly poem: a Walrus and a Carpenter who charm a crowd of trusting oysters onto a beach, therefore weep crocodile tears, and eat every single one. Alice declares she likes the Walrus least; he ate the most.
A quarrel over a spoiled rattle turns to talk of battle: the twins strap on pots for armor and raise wooden swords. But a monstrous black crow swoops from the sky, therefore both brothers flee into the wood, the fight forgotten entirely.
Running on, Alice catches a shawl blown loose from its owner: the White Queen, wild-haired and endearingly untidy, who thanks her vaguely and pins her wrapper on backward without noticing.
Mid-sentence the Queen transforms into an old Sheep, knitting needles clicking, and the woods become a cluttered little shop. Shelves shift whenever Alice looks straight at them, therefore every item she reaches for turns empty or wrong the moment she takes it.
The shop dissolves into a boat; Alice rows through scented rushes that melt in her hands the instant she picks them. Then, without transition, she is back in the shop again, buying an egg that grows larger the closer she carries it.
Across the next brook the egg becomes a person: Humpty Dumpty, perched precariously on a high wall, exactly as the old rhyme warns he will one day fall.
Humpty Dumpty boasts that if he ever did fall, the King himself has promised all his horses and all his men. Moments after Alice leaves, a great crash sounds behind her; the wall, it seems, could not hold him after all.
Alice presses on toward the sixth square, still chasing her promise of a crown at the eighth. Ahead, trumpets sound: the whole forest is rushing toward a clearing where, she is told, a crown itself is about to be fought for.
Two of the White King's messengers, Haigha and Hatta, hurry Alice toward the clearing, breathless and jittery, explaining almost nothing clearly. They insist she must see this for herself, therefore Alice quickens her pace to keep up with their odd loping strides.
In the clearing Alice watches a Lion and a Unicorn circle each other for the White King's crown. The Unicorn, spotting her, declares she is only a fabulous monster, and demands proof, mid-battle, that she is real at all.
A plum cake is cut for the crowd, but obeys looking-glass rules: it must be handed round first and sliced after, therefore it never divides fairly. Sudden drumming shakes the wood, and the whole company scatters, deafened, in every direction.
Only one square remains between Alice and her crown. Shaken but resolved, she straightens her pinafore and walks on alone, reminding herself that the eighth square, and the promise of it, is finally within reach.
On the seventh square a clanking Red Knight claims Alice as his prisoner. But a clumsy White Knight topples in to challenge him, therefore the two duel absurdly until the Red Knight tumbles from his horse and rides off defeated.
The White Knight offers to escort Alice safely to the last square. Gentle and endlessly inventive, he tumbles off his horse at every turn, forward, sideways, headfirst, yet always rises unbothered to explain his latest impractical invention.
Alice steps across the last brook onto the eighth square, and feels something settle heavily on her head. A golden crown. Around her, the Red and White Queens appear, declaring the game finished at last: Alice is a Queen.
The two Queens sweep the newly crowned Alice toward a feast in her honor, testing her first with rapid-fire riddles about manners and multiplication. Alice answers as best she can, therefore the Queens declare her, grudgingly, fit to be a Queen at all.
At the banquet, the food refuses to behave: a pudding scolds Alice for having been eaten, joints of meat bow and are whisked away uneaten, and every dish seems to have opinions of its own about being served.
The candles stretch up toward the ceiling like fireworks, bottles begin using plates as wings, and guests climb into the soup tureen, therefore the entire hall dissolves into shouting, laughing, uncontrollable pandemonium around the newly crowned Queen.
Overwhelmed, Alice seizes the Red Queen, who has shrunk suddenly small and doll-like, and shakes her hard, insisting the nonsense must stop. In her hands the Queen softens, therefore, and begins to change shape entirely.
The Red Queen dissolves into her own black kitten, purring in Alice's grip. Alice blinks, she is home, curled in the armchair, the mirror ordinary glass again, the entire chess-game journey folded back into a single afternoon dream.
Alice studies the kitten's face for a clue and demands to know: did she dream it all, or was she truly a piece in someone else's game? The kitten only blinks and washes its paw, offering no answer at all.
What it means
Alice asks, half to be kind, whether insects here answer to their names. The Gnat shrugs that names are no use at all if nothing answers, therefore, it says, why bother having one, and dissolves into the leaves still sighing.
Deeper in, Alice enters a wood where nothing has a name. She forgets even her own, and walks arm in arm with a gentle fawn, neither one afraid, until the trees end, names return, and the startled fawn bolts away.
The twins point to the Red King, snoring under a tree, and warn Alice she exists only inside his dream, that if he woke she'd vanish like a candle. Alice insists she is real, therefore refuses to believe them, though the thought unsettles her.
The White Queen confides her trick: she practices believing six impossible things before breakfast every morning. Her memory, she explains, works both ways at once, remembering things that haven't happened yet just as clearly as things that already have.
Humpty Dumpty declares, as Carroll wrote, when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. He explains, item by item, the invented words of Jabberwocky to a bewildered, fascinated Alice.
At the final brook the Knight sings Alice a wandering, melancholy song of his own invention, then watches her cross alone. Something in his sad, hopeful face lingers with her, therefore she looks back and waves long after he is out of sight.
Through the Looking-Glass never resolves whose dream is whose, Alice's or the sleeping Red King's, because that is the point: identity and meaning are as slippery as Humpty Dumpty's words, and the game is worth playing precisely because the rules bend.
🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.
