Archive review: Through the Looking-glass by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-glass, and What Alice found there
by Lewis Carroll, author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"'. With fifty illustrations, John Tenniel.
London: Macmillan and Co. 1872
Lewis Carroll has been telling another modern fairy tale to those three fortunate young ladies who have him for their fabulist, and now the result lies before us in a charming Christmas book, where those thousands of children of a larger or smaller growth who have laughed over the adventures of Alice, that most delightful of little girls, may follow their heroine through a new "Wonderland".
The realm of marvels which she visits on this occasion is "Looking-glass House" in the drawing-room: but her curiosity is strongly excited about the rest. "You can just see a little peep of the passage in 'Looking-glass House' if you leave the door of the drawing room wide open; and it's very like our passage as far as you see, only you know it might be quite different on beyond."
And very different on beyond it proves to be when Alice one day in a dream walks through the looking-glass and explores it. One very natural peculiarity of Looking-glass House is that most things in it are exactly reversed; accordingly if you want to go anywhere you have to turn round and walk the other way. People live backwards too, and their memory consequently works forward; thus there is an unfortunate person whom we find undergoing sentence in prison "the trial doesn't even begin until Wednesday, and the crime comes last of all".
Readers of the Wonderland will be sorry to hear that it is their old friend the Hatter who is in this predicament. He still preserves his hat, "in this style, 10s 6d" and seems to have lost none of his knack of getting into disgrace with royalty. He still has the March Hare for his companion, and the pair are as delightfully feeble and addle-brained as ever. They have nevertheless got on considerably in life, and are both messengers to the White King: for, in fact, Alice's adventures in Looking- glass House are a kind of game of chess, in which she starts as a white pawn and finally comes out a queen "in the eighth square" where she gives a very mad dinner party in honour of the event.
Among other strange creatures in this part of the world are the rockinghorse fly, whose "body is made of plum pudding, its wings of holly leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy". Alice meets also the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown, Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. She gets as much confused as ever and sadly set down and contradicted.