Through the Looking Glass

1872
Lewis Carroll
Illustrated by John Tenniel
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
B

OK, so it turns out that I don't like this sequel as much as the original.  Tenniel is as awesome as ever, and there's wordplay (like a pun on cutting food and cutting [snubbing] acquaintances) and absurdism, but it doesn't jell for me as much as the first "Alice" book.  The chess game gives it more structure, but I've never really understood chess, so some of this may be lost on me.  Some of the poetry is forgettable but I enjoy the multi-titled Knight's poem, the "Welcome Queen Alice" song, and of course "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter."

I like that Alice meets some comparatively nice people, like the Knight and the White Queen.  And I've always loved that two-paragraph-long Chapter Ten is followed by a chapter that's one-sentence-long, with Tenniel changing the Red Queen to the black kitten.  (This was before the inspired four-chapter sequence in New Moon where Stephenie Meyer lists months.)  As a child, I pored over the back to back illustrations of Alice halfway through the looking glass.  And yet, it's only on this reading that I realized that the "beamish boy" in the "Jabberwocky" picture looks like an adolescent girl (the figure and the long hair with a ribbon).  Since the warrior has striped stockings, perhaps it's meant to be Alice in a few years.

By the way, it's always a shock that Alice is only 7 1/2, meaning she would've been about 7 in the first book, and she definitely doesn't sound like even the most precocious 7-year-olds I've heard.  It makes me feel like Carroll didn't want us to take "the real world" much more seriously than Wonderland or Looking-Glass-Land.

In many adaptations, the two "Alice" stories are merged, so I sometimes have trouble remembering what happens in which.  This is the one with Humpty Dumpty making words mean what he wants them to mean, an attitude that, like the "backwards" opinions in Erewhon, feels surprisingly contemporary.  Perhaps the modern world is just a mirror image of the Victorian world.

I've now done more posts on the 1800s than any other century.  The 1900s will of course break this record, but it's worth noting, especially as I'm not even done with 1872....