Through the Looking-Glass

About the book

Alice wonders about the room reflected in a mirror and enters a country organised in part like a chessboard. Her encounters with queens, talking flowers, nursery-rhyme figures, and argumentative companions repeatedly overturn ordinary expectations. Carroll gives the journey a different pattern from Wonderland, using crossings and transformations to connect episodes whose logic is often precise but delightfully misplaced. Poems interrupt conversation, words become objects of dispute, and explanations can make a problem harder to understand. Alice's persistence supplies continuity as identity and direction keep changing around her. The book is playful about authority without requiring its young traveller to become solemnly wise. It rewards rereading for the way verbal jokes and imaginative scenes make familiar habits of thought appear newly optional.

• Language
• Identity
• Rules and imagination

Why read it

For intricate verbal play and a dreamlike journey whose apparent nonsense often follows a remarkably exact logic.

English text