Everyone remembers the rabbit hole. They remember the tea party, the Grinning Cat, and the "Off with her heads!" bit from the Queen of Hearts. But honestly? Alice Through the Looking Glass is the weirder, smarter, and much more structured sibling of the original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It’s not just a sequel. It’s a literal game.
Most people think Lewis Carroll—born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—just threw a bunch of random nonsense at a page twice. He didn't. While the first book follows the fluid, chaotic logic of a dream, Through the Looking Glass is a rigid, high-stakes game of chess played out across the English countryside. Alice starts as a White Pawn. She wants to be a Queen. To get there, she has to navigate a world where time runs backward, cakes are handed out before they’re sliced, and you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.
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The Mathematical Genius Behind the Mirror
Carroll wasn't just some whimsical storyteller. He was a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford. This matters because it explains why Alice Through the Looking Glass feels so different from the first book. If you look at the preface of the 1871 edition, Carroll actually includes a chess layout.
The moves Alice makes across the brooks (which represent the lines on a chessboard) actually correspond to a legal chess problem, though scholars like Martin Gardner have pointed out some "poetic license" in the moves. It's brilliant. You’ve got the Red Queen acting as a mentor/antagonist who moves with the speed and reach of a real Queen on the board. Then there's the White Knight, who is basically a self-portrait of Carroll—clumsy, kind, and constantly falling off his horse.
Why the Red Queen isn't the Queen of Hearts
This is the biggest mistake people make. They aren't the same person. The Queen of Hearts from the first book is a blind personification of rage—"a blind fury," as Carroll called her. The Red Queen? She’s different. She’s cold, formal, and strict. She’s the personification of the "rules" that Alice has to learn to grow up.
Think about the Red Queen’s Race. It’s one of the most famous metaphors in literature. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Biologists actually use this today. It's called the Red Queen Hypothesis. It describes how species must constantly adapt and evolve just to survive against ever-evolving predators. Carroll predicted evolutionary biology concepts while trying to entertain a child named Alice Liddell. That’s wild.
Jabberwocky and the Invention of Modern Language
You can’t talk about Alice Through the Looking Glass without mentioning "Jabberwocky." It’s probably the most famous nonsense poem in the English language.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves...
It sounds like gibberish. But because Carroll understood the syntax of the English language so deeply, your brain automatically assigns meaning to the words. We know "toves" is a noun. We know "slithy" is an adjective. He invented "portmanteau" words here—words where two meanings are packed into one, like "galumphing" (gallop and triumphant) or "chortle" (chuckle and snort). We use these words today as if they’ve always existed. He literally rewired how we speak.
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Humpty Dumpty shows up later to explain the poem to Alice, and he’s arguably the most arrogant character in the book. He treats language like something he owns. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty says in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." It’s a philosophical argument about semantics that linguists still debate. Does meaning belong to the speaker or the listener?
The Melancholy of the White Knight
There is a sadness in this book that the first one lacks. In Wonderland, Alice is a tourist. In Through the Looking Glass, she’s a participant who is slowly realizing that childhood is ending.
The scene with the White Knight is the heart of the story. He’s a bumbling inventor with a "mild eye and kindly smile." He keeps falling off his horse. He has inventions that make no sense, like a beehive for a horse or a mouse-trap to keep mice away from the saddle. When he finally leads Alice to the edge of the final brook—the one that will make her a Queen—he asks her to wait and wave her handkerchief until he disappears around a bend.
It’s Carroll saying goodbye to the real Alice Liddell. She was growing up. He knew he couldn't follow her into adulthood. It’s a heavy moment for a "children's book."
Reality vs. The Dream: Who is Dreaming Whom?
Here is the part that keeps philosophers up at night. The ending.
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Throughout the book, Alice finds the Red King snoring in the grass. Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell her that she isn't real. They tell her she’s just a "sort of thing" in the King's dream, and if he wakes up, she’ll go out like a candle.
Alice cries. She insists she’s real. But when she finally wakes up at the end of the story, she’s left with a haunting question: Which dreamed it? If Alice dreamed the King, and the King dreamed Alice, the whole universe of the book is a feedback loop. It’s meta-fiction before meta-fiction was a thing. Carroll was playing with the boundaries of identity and existence in a way that feels very "Matrix" for the 1870s.
How to Actually Read the Book Today
If you’re going to revisit Alice Through the Looking Glass, don’t treat it like a novel. It’s more of a puzzle.
- Look at the illustrations. John Tenniel’s wood engravings are the definitive versions. He hated the script, by the way. He thought Carroll was a nightmare to work with. But their tension created something iconic.
- Pay attention to the "Inversion" theme. Everything is backward. To give someone a cake, you hand it around first and slice it afterward. To reach a destination, you walk away from it.
- Watch the poetry. From "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to "Jabberwocky," the poems are where Carroll hides his sharpest social critiques of Victorian ego and greed.
Practical Takeaways for the Modern Reader
Reading Carroll’s sequel isn’t just a literary exercise. It’s a lesson in lateral thinking.
- Embrace the "Red Queen" mindset. Realize that standing still often means falling behind. Constant learning is the only way to maintain your position in a fast-moving world.
- Question your labels. Like Humpty Dumpty, we often assume we know what a word means, but communication is fragile. Be precise.
- Accept the transition. The White Knight’s farewell is a reminder that every phase of life has a "brook" you have to cross alone.
Alice Through the Looking Glass is a masterpiece of logic disguised as madness. It’s a book about a girl winning a game of chess against a world that doesn’t want her to succeed, and it’s arguably the most sophisticated piece of children's literature ever written.
To truly understand the story, grab a physical copy with the original Tenniel illustrations. Read the "Walrus and the Carpenter" out loud. Notice how the Walrus’s "sympathy" for the oysters doesn't stop him from eating every single one of them. It’s a cynical, brilliant, and deeply human look at the world through the other side of the glass.
Actionable Next Steps
- Map the Chess Moves: Get a copy of The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner. It explains every single chess move Alice makes and why they matter to the plot.
- Study Portmanteaus: Look up the etymology of "Jabberwocky" words. Seeing how Carroll fused "lithe" and "slimy" into "slithy" is a great lesson in creative writing and linguistic flexibility.
- Compare the Queens: Re-read the dialogue of the Red Queen versus the Queen of Hearts. Notice the shift from emotional volatility to cold, bureaucratic control—it’s a fascinating study in different types of authority.
By looking at the structure beneath the nonsense, you’ll find that Carroll wasn't just writing for kids; he was building a complex simulation of life, logic, and the inevitable loss of innocence.