Through the Looking-Glass: Writing, Publication, and Circulation

The book's full English title is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, then a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. After the success of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, he continued devising a new journey for the same girl, this time organizing her world through mirrors and chess.

By 1866, he had mentioned a sequel to Macmillan, and the first chapter reached the publisher early in 1869. Proposed titles included versions of Behind the Looking-Glass before settling on Through the Looking-Glass. Composition was not simply a replay of earlier scenes, but a gradual search for a narrative device that would place a familiar character under unfamiliar rules.

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John Tenniel returned as illustrator, with the title page specifying fifty illustrations. Collingwood's early biography records that Tenniel initially struggled to accept because of his workload. Once collaboration resumed, Dodgson continued asking detailed questions about dresses, beards, and characters' ages. Author and illustrator jointly determined the Alice readers would see.

Carroll worried that the Jabberwock image as a frontispiece would frighten children. After consulting friends, he substituted the mounted White Knight. The manuscript also contained an episode about a wasp in a wig, which Tenniel criticized in a letter both as a story and as difficult to illustrate; it was omitted from the published text. The final twelve chapters thus reflect cutting, revision, and coordination of word and image, rather than a story completed by the author alone.

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The opening places the adventure indoors in winter: holding a kitten, Alice imagines the room beyond the mirror, then passes through a surface dissolving like silvery mist. Chess pieces beside the fireplace can speak and move, while streams and hedges outdoors divide the ground into chessboard squares. The opening pages explicitly match characters with pieces, allowing readers to see the journey's structure in advance.

Alice begins as a White Pawn on the second square, aiming to become a queen on the eighth. A railway journey, twin brothers, the egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty, and a knight's escort are successively linked into this route. She is not collecting wonders aimlessly: as she advances, she learns rules other people continually announce to her.

The Red Queen makes her run desperately, yet they remain in the same place; to approach the Queen, Alice must walk in the opposite direction. These episodes invert familiar childhood experiences of movement and space. The chessboard supplies order to the route, while mirrors and dreams repeatedly disrupt everyday causality, together creating the book's comic rhythm.

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In Chapter One, “Jabberwocky” first appears in mirror writing. Even after using the mirror to read it correctly, Alice cannot understand many words, yet can tell that someone has killed some kind of monster. Readers occupy a similar position: syntax, rhythm, and the sequence of action supply clues, while unfamiliar vocabulary demands active guessing.

In Chapter Six, Humpty Dumpty explains “slithy” as a combination of “lithe” and “slimy,” using a portmanteau as an analogy for two meanings packed into one word. He also claims to determine words' meanings himself, while Alice asks how one word can arbitrarily carry so many meanings. Their exchange turns wordplay into a dispute over understanding and control: a speaker's authority may not suffice to make a listener accept an explanation.

The ending likewise refuses complete resolution. Alice's banquet as queen descends into chaos; she shakes the Red Queen and wakes holding a kitten. She wonders whether the whole adventure was her dream or the Red King's, and the narrator passes the question to readers. The final poem recalls a summer boat journey and children listening to stories, adding feelings about childhood and memory to the nonsense adventure.

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The first edition's title page bears 1872, but readers encountered the book in December 1871. Zoe Jaques's publishing-history research notes that Carroll received his copies on December 6. This establishes a stage of publication but does not make the receipt date an exact, uniform on-sale date for every bookshop.

Macmillan initially printed 9,000 copies and added another 6,000 amid strong early orders. Sheets for the American firm Lee and Shepard also shipped in early December. Red cloth binding and Tenniel's images made the book a companion to its predecessor, while the Christmas gift market and existing readership helped spread the sequel. Printing and order figures reflect production and sales expectations, not necessarily the number who had read it.

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In a letter preserved by Collingwood, Henry Kingsley even judged the new Alice better than the old and mentioned the publisher's scramble over insufficient copies. The Manchester Guardian, by contrast, considered the sequel inferior. Such responses show readers already using the first book as a benchmark, rather than treating the new work as an isolated children's book.

Circulation also took the form of textual re-creation. Collingwood records that A. A. Vansittart of Trinity College, Cambridge translated “Jabberwocky” into Latin elegiac verse in March 1872 and reproduces it in the biography. Strange words did not prevent imitation but invited further coinages. By joining chess, nursery rhymes, linguistic argument, and illustration, Through the Looking-Glass allowed children's reading games to extend into literary experiments by adults.

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