When was Through the Looking-Glass first published?

Macmillan & Co. published Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in December 1871, six years after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The title page is dated 1872, but copies reached shops in time for Christmas 1871, illustrated throughout by John Tenniel.

Why is the book structured around a chess game?

Lewis Carroll opens the book with a chess diagram and casts Alice as a White Pawn. She advances one square at a time by crossing brooks that divide the looking-glass landscape into a giant chessboard, and the story ends when she reaches the eighth rank and is crowned a queen. The moves loosely follow a real chess problem, though Carroll takes some liberties with the rules along the way.

Does Through the Looking-Glass include the poem "Jabberwocky"?

Yes. Alice finds "Jabberwocky" printed in mirror-writing early in the book and has to hold it up to the looking-glass to read it. The book also contains the long narrative poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter," recited to Alice by Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

Classics Fantasy

Pages: 224
Published: 1872
Language: English

Synopsis

Six months after her first adventure, Alice steps through the mirror above her fireplace into a world that mirrors her own but runs by reversed logic. The Looking-Glass world is laid out like a giant chessboard, and Alice, cast as a White Pawn, must cross it square by square to be crowned a queen.

Along the way she meets a garden of talking flowers, the constantly quarreling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a chess-piece White Knight prone to falling off his horse, and Humpty Dumpty, who lectures her on the meaning of words while perched on his wall. Lewis Carroll builds the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland around the rules and moves of chess rather than cards, folding in his best-known poem, "Jabberwocky," along the way.

Through the Looking-Glass extends the wordplay and logic games of the first book into a more structured, more melancholic story about growing up and the strangeness of rules imposed from outside.