By Lewis Carroll

Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There:

Through the Looking Glass and what Alice Found There is the second of Lewis Carroll’s whimsical tales following the character of Alice into a wild and fantastical world. In this world nothing is as it should be and all systems of logic and reason are sorely tried.

The story of how the adventures that Alice has in Wonderland came to be written, and the author’s association with the Liddell family – and Alice Liddell in particular – is now the stuff of legend. One summer afternoon in 1862, the author, in the company of the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three Liddell sisters, Lorina Charlotte, Alice Pleasance and Edith Mary out in a rowing boat on the River Thames, near Oxford. On that boat trip, he entertained the girls by telling them a story about a bored little girl called Alice who goes looking for an adventure. Alice, aged 10, loved the story so much, she asked Dodgson to write it down for her.

A year later, Dodgson gave the unfinished manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground to his friend and mentor George MacDonald, the poet and Christian fantasy writer who also inspired C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Two years later, in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published – and sold out rapidly. Early fans of the story included a young Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria. The huge success of the story prompted Carroll to write a further adventure for Alice, and Through the Looking Glass was published in 1871.

Unlike most sequels, this one bore no references to its predecessor and stands entirely alone as a book. Where the theme of the first book was a pack of cards, this one used a chess game with which to challenge and bamboozle Alice, and us.

This is the home of the Jabberwocky, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and that most contemporary of women the White Queen who can only stay in the same place by running frantically to keep up with the speed of the world! It is a glorious game, played with a Master, that leaves us spinning and grinning in its wake.