Frequently Asked Questions About Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Name: Through the Looking Glass
Author: Lewis Carroll

Question 1

What is Through the Looking-Glass about?

Accepted Answer

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland. Alice steps through the mirror above her fireplace and enters Looking-Glass World, a realm where everything is reversed and the landscape is arranged as a giant chess board. The Red Queen tells Alice she is a pawn and must travel across the board, brook by brook, to become a queen. Along the way she meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the White Queen, and the White Knight, among others. The adventure ends with Alice crowned as queen at a chaotic banquet — and then waking to find her kitten sitting in her lap.

Question 2

How is Through the Looking-Glass different from Alice in Wonderland?

Accepted Answer

While both books feature Alice in a dreamlike fantasy world full of absurd characters, Through the Looking-Glass is generally considered darker and more philosophical than Alice in Wonderland. Several things explain the shift: Carroll wrote it six years later, after the Liddell family ended contact with him and after his father died unexpectedly. The Looking-Glass book also has a stronger organizing structure — the chess game — which gives it a more deliberate, almost melancholy feeling of inevitability. Where Wonderland is driven by chaotic adventure, Looking-Glass is about a journey with a destination, and the themes of growing up and the power of language are explored more directly. Many students and teachers find it the more intellectually rewarding of the two.

Question 3

What are the main themes of Through the Looking-Glass?

Accepted Answer

The book's central themes are growing up, language and power, and the reversal of logic. Alice's journey from pawn to queen mirrors the passage from childhood into adulthood — and Carroll's twist is that becoming a queen makes things no clearer. Humpty Dumpty's insistence that words mean whatever he decides they mean raises pointed questions about who controls meaning and communication. The reversed logic of Looking-Glass World — where you run to stay still, live time backward, and remember things that haven't happened yet — satirizes the hidden absurdities of adult social rules. Carroll was also interested in identity: Alice repeatedly struggles to say who she is, and the strange inhabitants of Looking-Glass World do little to help her.

Question 4

Who are the main characters in Through the Looking-Glass?

Accepted Answer

Alice is the curious, polite, but increasingly frustrated protagonist who navigates Looking-Glass World as a chess pawn turned queen. The Red Queen is imperious and relentless, famous for her declaration that it "takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." The White Queen is vague and helpless but surprisingly wise, believing six impossible things before breakfast. Humpty Dumpty is the book's great philosopher of language, insisting words mean whatever he pays them to mean — until he falls. Tweedledum and Tweedledee — identical, quarrelsome twins — recite The Walrus and the Carpenter. The White Knight, widely taken as Carroll's self-portrait, is a bumbling inventor who is also the kindest figure Alice meets.

Question 5

What is the chess game in Through the Looking-Glass and what does it symbolize?

Accepted Answer

The entire adventure is structured as a game of chess. Looking-Glass World is divided into squares by brooks and hedges, and the characters Alice meets are chess pieces: kings, queens, knights, and pawns. Alice begins as a pawn — the weakest piece on the board — and must travel from square to square until she reaches the eighth rank and is promoted to queen. Carroll even provides a chess diagram at the start of the book showing the moves. Scholars read the chess game as a metaphor for growing up: Alice has little control over where she moves, she is often transported from square to square without quite understanding how, and becoming a queen does not resolve her confusion. The game also represents fate and predestination — the moves are fixed, and Alice's journey is guided by forces larger than herself.

Question 6

What is the poem Jabberwocky in Through the Looking-Glass?

Accepted Answer

Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem Alice discovers in the first chapter, printed in mirror-writing so she must hold it up to the looking-glass to read it. It tells the story of a young hero who slays a fearsome creature called the Jabberwock using a "vorpal sword." Nearly all of the poem's vivid adjectives and nouns — "brillig," "slithy toves," "mimsy borogoves" — are invented words coined by Carroll. Later in the book, Humpty Dumpty explains some of them to Alice, though his explanations are themselves a performance of the book's theme: meaning is assigned by whoever holds the power to assign it. Jabberwocky is one of the most famous nonsense poems in the English language, and several of its coinages — including chortle and galumph — have entered everyday use.

Question 7

What does Humpty Dumpty say about words and meaning in Through the Looking-Glass?

Accepted Answer

In Chapter 6, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." When Alice objects that the question is whether he can make words mean so many different things, he replies: "The question is which is to be master — that's all." This exchange has become a touchstone in philosophy of language. Carroll — himself a logician — was exploring what happens when the relationship between words and meaning becomes purely a matter of power rather than shared convention. Humpty Dumpty is presented as ridiculous, but his position is also uncomfortably logical. He also explains several of the invented words in Jabberwocky to Alice during the same conversation.

Question 8

Where can I read Through the Looking-Glass online for free?

Accepted Answer

You can read the complete text of Through the Looking-Glass free online at American Literature — all 12 chapters, from "Looking-Glass House" to "Which Dreamed It?", with no sign-up or subscription required. American Literature also has the full text of Alice in Wonderland, the poem Jabberwocky (which Alice first encounters in Chapter 1), and The Walrus and the Carpenter (recited by Tweedledee in Chapter 4).

Through the Looking Glass

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