 Alice passes through the looking-glass and out the other side | |
| Author | Lewis Carroll |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | John Tenniel |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's fiction Portal fantasy Literary nonsense |
| Publisher | Macmillan & Co |
Publication date | December 1871 |
| Publication place | London |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Preceded by | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland |
| Text | Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There atWikisource |
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a novel published in December 1871 byLewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer atChrist Church, Oxford. It is the sequel to hisAlice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which many of the characters wereanthropomorphicplaying cards. In this second novel the theme ischess. As in the earlier book, the central figure,Alice, enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a large looking-glass (a mirror)[n 1] into a world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just as in a reflection, things are reversed, including logic (for example, running helps one remain stationary, walking away from something brings one towards it, chessmen are alive and nursery-rhyme characters are real).
Among the characters Alice meets are the severeRed Queen,[n 2] the gentle and flusteredWhite Queen, the quarrelsome twinsTweedledum and Tweedledee, the rude and opinionatedHumpty Dumpty, and the kindly but impracticalWhite Knight. Eventually, as in the earlier book, after a succession of strange adventures, Alice wakes and realises she has been dreaming. As inAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, the original illustrations are byJohn Tenniel.
The book contains several verse passages, including "Jabberwocky", "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and the White Knight's ballad, "A-sitting On a Gate". LikeAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, the book introduces phrases that have become common currency, including "jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day", "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast", "un-birthday presents", "portmanteau words" and "as large as life and twice as natural".
Through the Looking Glass has been adapted for the stage and the screen andtranslated into many languages. Critical opinion of the book has generally been favourable and either ranked it on a par with its predecessor or else only just short of it.
Although by 1871Lewis Carroll had published several books and papers under his real name – Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – they had all been scholarly works about mathematics, on which he lectured at theUniversity of Oxford.[n 3] Under his pseudonym he had publishedAlice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the work for which he was known to the wider public.[3] That book was greatly different from muchVictorian literature for children, which was frequentlydidactic and moralistic, sometimes displaying religious fervour and emphasising human sinfulness.[4]The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Carroll's book as "a landmark 'nonsense' text, liberating children from didactic fiction".[5] A reviewer at the time of publication commented that the book "has no moral, and does not teach anything. It is without any of that bitter foundation which some people imagine ought to be at the bottom of all children's books".[6] Another wrote, "If there be such a thing as perfection in children's tales, we should be tempted to say that Mr Carroll had reached it".[6] The book sold in large numbers,[5] and within a year of its publication Carroll was contemplating a sequel.[7]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had grown from stories Carroll improvised forAlice Liddell and her sisters, the daughters of his Oxford neighboursHenry and Lorina Liddell.[8] The proposed sequel had fewer such sources to draw on and was planned from the outset for publication.[9] When Lorina Liddell became pregnant again the three children were sent to stay with their maternal grandmother at her house, Hetton Lawn, inCharlton Kings, nearCheltenham, where Carroll visited them. Above the drawing-room fireplace there was an enormous looking-glass (in more modern terms, a mirror).[n 1] Carroll's biographerMorton N. Cohen suggests that it may have inspired the idea of climbing up to thechimney-piece and going through to the other side of the looking-glass.[13] This was not confirmed by Carroll and nor was an alternative account stating that the looking-glass theme was suggested by another Alice – Carroll's cousin Alice Raikes – who recalled being in his company as a child and standing in front of a long mirror, holding an orange in her right hand. Carroll asked her in which hand the little girl in the mirror held it, and she replied, "The left hand ... but if I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right?"[14][n 4]
In August 1866 Carroll wrote to his publisher,Alexander MacMillan, "It will probably be some time before I again indulge in paper and print. I have, however, a floating idea of writing a sort of sequel to Alice".[16] He developed the idea, working slowly and intermittently; in February 1867 he told Macmillan, "I am hoping before long to complete another book about Alice. ... You would not, I presume, object to publish the book, if it should ever reach completion".[17] In January 1869 he sent Macmillan the first completed chapter of the new book, tentatively titledBehind the Looking-Glass, and then spent a further year finishing the rest. The title of the book caused him some difficulty. He considered calling itLooking-Glass World, but Macmillan was unenthusiastic. At the suggestion of an Oxford colleague,Henry Liddon, Carroll adopted the titleThrough the Looking-Glass.[18]
Carroll had great difficulty in finding an illustrator for the book. He first approachedJohn Tenniel, whose drawings forAlice's Adventures in Wonderland had been well received:The Pall Mall Gazette said, "The illustrations by Mr Tenniel are beyond praise. His rabbit, his puppy, his mad hatter are things not to be forgotten".[19] The collaboration had not been smooth: Carroll was a perfectionist and insisted on minutely controlling all aspects of the production of his books. His publishers,Macmillan & Co, arranged for printing and distribution (for a ten per cent commission), but Carroll paid all the costs – printing, illustration and advertising – and made all the decisions. Tenniel was not enthusiastic about working with Carroll again; he said he was too busy as chief cartoonist forPunch and declined the commission.[20][n 5] He suggested one of his predecessors atPunch,Richard Doyle, but Carroll thought him "no longer good enough".[24] Other artists considered but rejected wereArthur Hughes[24] andW. S. Gilbert.[25][n 6] Macmillan suggestedNoel Paton, who had drawn the frontispiece forThe Water-Babies, but he declined because of pressure of other work.[27] Eventually Carroll made a second approach to Tenniel, who reluctantly agreed to provide the illustrations for the new book, but only at his own pace. Carroll noted in his diary, "He thinks it possible (but not likely) that we might get it out by Christmas 1869".[24]
While the book was atproof stage Carroll made a substantial cut of about 1,400 words. The omitted section introduced a wasp wearing a yellow wig and includes a complete five-stanza poem that Carroll did not reuse elsewhere. If included in the book it would have followed, or been included at the end of, Chapter Eight – the chapter featuring the encounter with the White Knight.[28] Tenniel wrote to Carroll:
The author cut the section. The manuscript has never been found and scholars searched unsuccessfully for years for traces of the missing material. Doubts arose whether it had ever existed, but in 1974 the London auction houseSotheby's offered for sale a batch ofgalley proofs with handwritten revisions and a note directing the printer to take the section out of the book.[28][n 7] The chapter was first published in 1977 in a 37-page book by the Carroll scholarMartin Gardner, issued in New York by theLewis Carroll Society of North America and in London by Macmillan & Co. It was reproduced in full by the British newspaperThe Sunday Telegraph that September, with notes by Cohen.[28] Although Tenniel had told Carroll that "a wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art",[29] the text printed byThe Sunday Telegraph was accompanied by illustrations specially drawn or painted byRalph Steadman,Sir Hugh Casson,Peter Blake andPatrick Procktor.[31]
On 4 January 1871 Carroll finished the text, and later that month wrote that the secondAlice book "has cost me, I think, more trouble than the first, and ought to be equal to it in every way". Tenniel had yet to produce nearly half the pictures. By the end of the year the book was ready for press. The title page carries the publication date 1872, butThrough the Looking-Glass was on sale in time for Christmas 1871.[32] Within weeks 15,000 copies had been sold.[33] The first American edition was issued by Lee and Sheppard of Boston and New York in 1872.[34]
At the start of the book, Carroll includes a list of "Dramatis Personae as arranged before commencement of game".[35] He then gives notes to thechess game the characters play out in the story.[n 8]
For other characters, seeList of minor characters inThrough the Looking-Glass.
Alice progresses across a chessboard-like landscape in which the squares are separated by small brooks. Each time she steps across a brook to a new square in Chapters Three to Nine she finds herself meeting new characters in a self-contained story.[37]
On a snowy November nightAlice is sitting in an armchair before the fireplace, playing with a white kitten ("Snowdrop") and a black kitten ("Kitty"). She talks to Kitty about the game of chess and then speculates what the world is like on the other side of a mirror. Climbing up to thechimney piece, she touches the looking-glass above the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she can step through it: "In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room". She finds herself in a reflected version of her own home and notices a book with looking-glass poetry, "Jabberwocky", whosereversed printing she can read only by holding it up to the mirror. In this room herchess pieces have come to life, although they remain small enough for her to pick up.[38]
On leaving the house Alice enters a sunny spring garden where the flowers can speak. Some of them are quite rude to her. Elsewhere in the garden, she meets theRed Queen, who is now human-sized, and who impresses Alice with her ability torun at breathtaking speeds.[39]
The Red Queen explains that the entire countryside is laid out in squares, like a gigantic chessboard, and says that Alice will be a queen if she can advance all the way to the eighth rank on the board.[n 11] Because theWhite Queen'spawn, Lily, is too young to play, Alice is placed in the second rank in her stead. The Red Queen leaves her with the advice, "Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing – turn out your toes when you walk – and remember who you are!"[40]
Alice finds herself as a passenger on a train that jumps over the third row directly into the fourth.[n 12] She arrives in a forest where a gnat teaches her about looking glass insects such as the "Bread-and-butterfly" and "Rocking-horsefly". It then vanishes.[42]
Alice crosses the "wood where things have no names". There she cannot follow the Red Queen's advice – "remember who you are" – and forgets her own name. Together with afawn, who has also forgotten who or what he is, she makes her way to the other side, where they both remember everything. The fawn bounds away.[43]
Alice follows a signpost pointing to the house of the twin brothersTweedledum and Tweedledee, names familiar from thenursery rhyme, which she recites:
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.[44]
The brothers insist that Tweedledee should now recite to her – and they choose the longest poem they know: "The Walrus and the Carpenter".[45] Its eighteen stanzas include:
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax
Of cabbages, and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings".[46]
A noise that Alice mistakes for the roaring of a wild beast is heard. It is the snoring of theRed King – sleeping under a nearby tree. The brothers upset her by saying that she is merelyan imaginary figure in the Red King's dreams and will vanish when he wakes.[47] The brothers begin equipping themselves for their battle, but are frightened away by the monstrous crow.[48]
Alice next meets the White Queen, who is absent-minded but canremember future events before they have happened: "That's the effect of living backwards ... it always makes one a little giddy at first". She advises Alice to practise believing impossibilities: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast".[49]
Alice and the White Queen advance into the chessboard's fifth rank by crossing over a brook together, but at the moment of the crossing, the Queen suddenly becomes atalking Sheep in asmall shop. Alice soon finds herself on water, struggling to handle the oars of a small rowing boat; the Sheep annoys her by shouting about "crabs" and "feathers". After rowing back to the shop Alice finds trees growing in it, alongside a little brook – "Well, this is the very queerest shop I ever saw!"[50]
After crossing the brook into the sixth rank, Alice encounters the giant egg-shapedHumpty Dumpty, sitting on a wall. He is celebrating hisun-birthday, which he explains is one of the 364 days of the year when one might get un-birthday presents. He is quite rude to Alice but provides her with translations of the strange terms in "Jabberwocky". In the process, he introduces her to the concept ofportmanteau words: "Well, then, 'mimsy' is 'flimsy and miserable' (there’s another portmanteau for you)". Just after she has parted company with him he has a great fall: "a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end".[51]
All the king's horses and all the king's men come to Humpty Dumpty's assistance, and are accompanied by theWhite King, along withthe Lion and the Unicorn. TheMarch Hare and theHatter[n 13] appear in the guise of messengers called "Haigha" and "Hatta", whom the White King employs "to come and go. One to come, and one to go".[53]
The nursery rhyme about the Lion and the Unicorn ends: "Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town". They are starting on the plum-cake when a deafening noise of drumming is heard.[54]
Alarmed by the noise, Alice crosses another brook, reaching the seventh rank and the forested territory of theRed Knight, who seeks to capture her, but theWhite Knight comes to her rescue, though repeatedly falling off his horse. He is an inveterate inventor of useless things. Escorting Alice through the forest towards the final brook-crossing, he recites "A-sitting on a Gate", a poem of his own composition.[55] Carroll writes in this chapter:
Bidding farewell to the White Knight, Alice steps across the last brook, and is automatically a queen;[n 11] a golden crown materialises on her head. She is joined by the White and Red Queens, who invite each other to a party that will be hosted by Alice. The two fall asleep.[57]
Alice arrives at a doorway over which are the words "Queen Alice" in large letters. She goes in and finds her banquet already in progress. There are three chairs at the head of the table; the Red and White Queens are seated in two of them; the middle one is empty and Alice sits in it. She attempts a speech of thanks to her guests but the banquet becomes chaotic. Crying "I can't stand this any longer!" Alice jumps up and seizes the table-cloth, pulls it and plates, dishes, guests, and candles come crashing down in a heap. She blames the Red Queen for everything:
Alice seizes the Red Queen and begins shaking her ...[59]
... and awakes in her armchair to find herself holding Kitty, who, she concludes, has been the Red Queen all along, Snowdrop having been the White Queen. Alice then recalls the speculation of Tweedledum and Tweedledee that everything may have been a dream of the Red King. "He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream, too!" Carroll leaves the reader with the question, "Which do you think it was?"[60]
Through the Looking-Glass builds on the first book's themes of language, linguistic puzzles and wordplay.[61] The poetW. H. Auden commented that words in theAlice books "have a life and a will of their own".[62] Carroll's linguistic games parody the incoherence of real-world institutions and social structures.[63] Like its predecessor, the book has legalistic elements that convey how systems of order can appear structured but remain completely arbitrary.[64] As in a symmetrical chess game, many aspects of the story are mirrored or inverted.[65] Cause and effect are often reversed: for example, Alice can only reach the Red Queen by walking in reverse.Through the Looking Glass juxtaposes sense with nonsense and sanity with insanity.[66] The more consistent rules ofThrough the Looking Glass cast Alice more clearly as a child intruding into an adult world, and capable of seeing through the arbitrary nature of the social structures.[67] The book pays more attention to the passage of time and has moments of playful rebellion against the adult world along with melancholy for the coming end of Alice's childhood:[68] the beginning and end both have themes of winter and death, linked with the end of childhood.[69]
Whereas the firstAlice novel hasplaying cards as a theme,Through the Looking-Glass uses chess; many of the main characters are represented by chess pieces, Alice being a pawn. The looking-glass world consists of square fields divided by brooks or streams, and the crossing of each brook signifies a change in scene, Alice advancing one square.
At the beginning of the book Carroll provides and explains achess composition, corresponding to the events of the story. Although the moves follow therules of chess, other basic rules are ignored: one player (White) makes several consecutive moves, and a latecheck is left undealt with. Carroll also explains that certain items listed in the composition do not have corresponding piece moves but simply refer to the story, e.g. the "castling of the three Queens, which is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace".[35]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland contains several parodies of Victorian poetry,[79] but inThrough the Looking-Glass there is only one: the White Knight’s ballad, described by the literary criticHarold Bloom as "a superb and loving parody ofWordsworth's great crisis-poem 'Resolution and Independence'". Beverly Lyon Clark, in a study of Carroll's verse, writes that the ballad also contains echoes of Wordsworth's "The Thorn" andThomas Moore's "My Heart and Lute".[79]
Walter Scott's "Bonny Dundee" is clearly the basis for "To the Looking-Glass World it was Alice that Said", but Carroll simply uses its form and metre rather than parodying it.[80] Although the rhyme scheme and metre of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" mirror those ofThomas Hood's ballad "The Dream of Eugene Aram", Carroll is not parodying the latter; he commented, "The metre is a common one", and said he had no particular poem in mind.[80]
As in the earlier book, some of the characters incorporate elements of real people whom the Liddell sisters would have known. The Red Queen (described by the Rose as "one of the kind that has nine spikes")[81] is based on theirgoverness, Miss Prickett, known to them as "Pricks".[82] The White Knight contains elements of Carroll himself and of a college friend, the chemist and inventorAugustus Vernon Harcourt,[83] although Bloom also finds echoes of "the kindly, heroic, and benignly madDon Quixote".[84] In a 1933 essayShane Leslie suggests that inThrough the Looking Glass Carroll was satirising the controversialOxford Movement, which sought to align the Church of England more closely with the Catholic Church, Tweedledum representing "high church" reformers and Tweedledee representing "low church" opponents of the movement. In Leslie's hypothesis there are other Oxonian and church references, the Sheep, the White Queen and the White King drawing, respectively, onEdward Pusey,J. H. Newman andBenjamin Jowett, the White and Red Knights representingThomas Huxley andSamuel Wilberforce, and the Jabberwock the Papacy.[85] The theologian and novelistRonald Knox agreed that the Papacy was a target, maintaining that "impenetrability" – one of Humpty Dumpty's words – was a joke against the doctrine ofpapal infallibility.[86]
LikeAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, the book contains many phrases that became common currency.[87] Here they include "cabbages and kings", "jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day", "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast", "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean", "un-birthday presents", "portmanteau words", "Anglo-Saxon attitudes" and "as large as life and twice as natural".[88]
Most stage and screen adaptations of the Lewis Carroll novels concentrate on the more familiarAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, although many of them import characters fromThrough the Looking-Glass.[89][n 14]
Through the Looking Glass has been adapted at least three times for the theatre.George Grossmith Jr presented a version at theNew Theatre in 1903.[95]Nancy Price adapted and presented the piece at theLittle Theatre in 1935, and revived it for the Christmas seasons of the next three years.[96] The cast includedFrith Banbury (Unicorn),Ernest Butcher (Tweedledee),Michael Martin Harvey (White Knight),Esmé Percy (Humpty Dumpty) andJoyce Redman (Tiger Lily).[97] In 1954 a stage adaptation by Felicity Douglas,Alice Through the Looking-Glass, was presented at thePrince's Theatre with a cast includingMichael Denison (Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty),Binnie Hale (Red Queen),Griffith Jones (Tweedledum and Red Knight),Carol Marsh (Alice) andMargaret Rutherford (White Queen).[98]
A 2016 film titledAlice Through the Looking Glass uses some of the novel's characters, but the plot is unrelated to it.[99]
The first full-cast sound radio version of the book was transmitted onBBC Radio in 1944, with a cast including Esmé Percy,Leslie French andEric Maturin.[100] A further radio version was broadcast as a five-part serial in 1948, withAngela Glynne as Alice,Derek McCulloch as narrator and a cast includingVivienne Chatterton (White Queen),Mary O'Farrell (Red Queen),Carleton Hobbs (Tweedledum and Lion),Norman Shelley (Gnat),Marjorie Westbury (Fawn) andRichard Goolden (White Knight).[101]
A 1963 adaptation forBBC Network Three had a cast includingPeter Sallis (Tweedledee),Peter Pratt (White King) andGeoffrey Bayldon (White Knight).[102] A further five-part adaptation was broadcast on theHome Service in 1964 withPrunella Scales as Alice.[103]BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new adaptation in December 2012, featuringJulian Rhind-Tutt as Carroll andLauren Mote (Alice),Carole Boyd (Red Queen),Sally Phillips (White Queen),Nicholas Parsons (Humpty Dumpty),Alistair McGowan (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) andJohn Rowe (White Knight).[104]
Amusical adaptation for American television in 1966 had a book by Albert Simmons, music byMark Charlap and lyrics by Elsie Simmons. The cast includedNanette Fabray (White Queen),Agnes Moorehead (Red Queen),Ricardo Montalbán (White King),Robert Coote (Red King),Jimmy Durante (Humpty Dumpty),Jack Palance (the Jabberwock) and theSmothers Brothers (Tweedledum and Tweedledee).[89]
Some characters fromThrough the Looking Glass featured in a conflation of both books onBBC Television in 1960,[n 15] but the first British television adaptation ofThrough the Looking Glass was in 1973, featuringSarah Sutton (Alice),Brenda Bruce (White Queen),Richard Pearson (White King),Judy Parfitt (Red Queen), Geoffrey Bayldon (White Knight) andFreddie Jones (Humpty Dumpty).[106]
A1998 television version featuredKate Beckinsale (Alice),Penelope Wilton (White Queen),Geoffrey Palmer (White King),Siân Phillips (Red Queen) andDesmond Barrit (Humpty Dumpty).[107]
A dramatised audio version, directed byDouglas Cleverdon, was released in 1959 byArgo Records. The book is narrated byMargaretta Scott, starringJane Asher as Alice, along with Frank Duncan,Tony Church, Norman Shelley and Carleton Hobbs.[108] The book has been the basis of musical compositions.Deems Taylor wrote an orchestral suite in 1919 with one of the novel's episodes represented in each of its five movements.[109]Alfred Reynolds composed another orchestral suite based on the book in 1947.[110]
Through the Looking Glass has been published in many languages, including Afrikaans, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Russian.[111] In French, Tweedledee and Tweedledum have been rendered as "Bonnet-Blanc" and "Blanc-Bonnet" and Humpty Dumpty as "Gros-Coco".[112] The Rocking-horse-fly becomesLa Mouche-à-chevaux-de-bois.[113] The opening lines of "Jabberwocky":
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
become in French (present tense):[114]
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux,
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
and in German, in the earliest of several translations:[115][n 16]
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Rath' ausgraben
Critical response was highly favourable.The Pall Mall Gazette singled out "Jabberwocky": "what pleases us most is the stanza with which the ballad begins and ends. Anything more affecting than those lines we rarely meet in the poetry of our day. Once admitted to memory, they will for ever maintain a place there". As to the book as a whole the paper judged it almost up to the standard of its predecessor – "there is not much to choose between them". Tenniel too was praised: "Those who remember his picture of the grin of the Cheshire Cat (not the cat, but the grin) will find a similar exercise of his skill in the woodcut representing Alice as she fades through the looking-glass".[117]
The Illustrated London News found the book "quite as rich in humorous whims of fantasy, quite as laughable in its queer incidents, as lovable for its pleasant spirit and graceful manner" as its predecessor:
The Examiner found the sequel not quite as good as the original but "quite good enough to delight every sensible reader of any age", It praised the "wit and humour that all children can appreciate, and grown folks ought as thoroughly to enjoy".[119]The Times said:
The reviewer in a New York newspaper,The Independent, wrote, "we know no higher praise than to say it is the equal of that charming juvenileAlice's Adventures in Wonderland ... Lewis Carroll has succeeded in giving to his books a purity, a daintiness, and an absolute adaptation to child-wants which are remarkable. Tenniel's illustrations, too, are exquisitely drawn".[121]
Among more recent comments on the book, Daniel Hahn inThe Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (2015) writes that sentimentality plays a larger part inThrough the Looking Glass than inAlice's Adventures in Wonderland. He instances Alice's encounter with the Fawn in the wood and the description of her picking scented rushes while in the Sheep's boat. In Hahn's view, Alice's farewell to the White Knight has emotional overtones often thought to represent Carroll's sundering from Alice Liddell as she grows up.[34]
Hahn also comments on the levels of threatened violence in the book. "Jabberwocky" introduces a note of real horror; and there is a frequent threat of death or dissolution. The oysters in "The Walrus and The Carpenter" are all eaten "despite (or perhaps because of) their childlike innocence"; and Alice is made to fear that she will disappear if she is in the Red King's dream and he wakes up.[34]
Although many later writers, includingJean Ingelow,Christina Rossetti,Charles E. Carryl andE. F. Benson, attempted to follow Carroll's lead,Through the Looking Glass, as opposed toAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, is rarely the identifiable influence.[122]Lawrence Durrell draws on "Jabberwocky" in his collection of comic short storiesSauve qui peut (1966): "You can damn well take a hundred lines, Dovebasket ... 'In future I must not be such a blasted Borogrove'".[123]Douglas Adams, in hisHitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, borrows from the White Queen: "If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?"[124] Adams's character Mr Prosser shares Alice's concern about being a mere figment of someone else's dream: "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it".[125] A disembodied quiet voice talks to Adams'sZaphod Beeblebrox in much the same way as the gnat inThrough the Looking Glass talks quietly in Alice's ear.[126]
Angus Wilson drew onThrough the Looking Glass for the title of his 1956 novelAnglo-Saxon Attitudes but otherwise his book has nothing to do with Carroll's story.[127] Another title drawn from Carroll's book is theRed Queen hypothesis – derived from her words to Alice "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"[128] – that to survive, a species must evolve rapidly enough to counter evolutionary changes in ecologically competing species.[129]The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature cites theAlice books – not specifically the second – as important influences onL. Frank Baum'sThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and comments, "The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) byNorton Juster recaptures theAlice style more naturally than do most other imitations (though according to Juster, he had never readAlice at the time he wrote it)".[122]
Quotations related toThrough the Looking-Glass at Wikiquote
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The full text ofThrough the Looking-Glass at Wikisource
Through the Looking-Glass public domain audiobook atLibriVox
