Tweedledum and Tweedledee enantiomorphs — three-dimensional mirror images. Evidence for these assumptions cannot be found in any of Lewis Carroll's writings. Tweedledum and Tweedledee Tweedledum and Tweedledee are fictional characters in an English nursery rhyme and in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There". Their names may have originally come from an epigram written by poet John Byrom. The nursery rhyme has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19800. The names have since become synonymous in western popular culture slang for any two people who look and act in identical ways, generally in a derogatory context. Common versions of
John Byrom headed with "Christmas Day for Dolly", was first published in Harrop's "Manchester Mercury" in 1746. Although Byrom is probably best remembered for this Christmas carol, he was regarded by his contemporaries as a poet and a literary man. Most of his poems, the best-known of which is "My spirit longeth for Thee", were religious in tone. He is also remembered for his epigrams and, above all, his coinage of the phrase "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" (in connection with a dispute about the merits of the two composers, Handel and Bononcini). Byrom did not lead an ordinary provincial life. He was a