Quite the Fairy-Tale
A Review of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
By Julia A. Keirns
The full title of this text is “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.” As Carroll begins this text, he claims in the introduction poem that he has written this fairy-tale for the children. The story begins with the little black and white kittens of Dinah the housecat. The little black kitten is quite the problem and is always getting into trouble. Alice tells the kittens a story about the house on the other side of the looking glass mirror and ends up actually going through it to see what is on the other side. She encounters all of the Red and White Chess pieces and also notes that everything is quite backwards. After all, everything in a mirror is always backwards, isn’t it?
The well-known Jabberwocky poem comes about in the first chapter, and yes, even Alice admits that it is quite difficult to understand. She talks to the flowers in the garden and gets in trouble with the queens. She meets quite the creatures and insects and ends up on a train with a beetle and a goat. She meets a large gnat and a fawn while venturing on the way to the house of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. By now she is lost in a forest and decides to go and ask them the way out. The two of them were arguing because Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoiled his nice new rattle. Tweedledee tells her a long poem about a walrus and a carpenter. I do love Lewis Carroll’s poetry, the rhythm and rhyme are quite easy to read and there is a nice flow to them all.
A huge crow chases after her and she runs back into the White Queen. The queen wraps herself in wool and turns into a sheep. Alice tries to buy an egg from the sheep’s shop but as she walks towards it she discovers that the egg seems to get further away, and then it seems to turn into a tree. Everything seems to grow branches and turn into a tree. She meets Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall, and as she continues through the forest, she meets a lion and a unicorn.
Alice’s adventures through the looking glass are just as much nonsense as they are down the rabbit hole, but oh what an adventure it is. Alice finds a gold crown and makes herself a queen. She determines the Red Queen to be the cause of all the trouble she has encountered. As she begins to punish the red queen by shaking some sense into her, the red queen turns into the little black kitten, who was after all, the cause of all the trouble in the beginning of the book.
There are fewer chapters in this book, but each chapter is longer than in the first Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It still could be read to children one chapter each night. I would love to see this kind of reading to children become more popular again. Sometimes I feel like the classics are lost with all of the technology in our world today.