Through the Looking-Glass

Six months after her trip to Wonderland, Alice climbs through the mirror above her fireplace into a world where everything runs backwards and the countryside is laid out like a chessboard. To become a queen she must cross it square by square, meeting Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the gentle White Knight and the Red Queen, who has to run as fast as she can just to stay in the same place.

Published in 1871, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is more mathematical and a little melancholy, and it gave English the nonsense poem 'Jabberwocky' and 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'. Carroll's logic jokes are as clever for adults as the adventures are for children.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), a shy mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, who was also a deacon, a pioneering photographer and the author of books on logic. On a boat trip in July 1862 he made up a story for the three daughters of the college dean, and ten-year-old Alice Liddell asked him to write it down.

The result, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, followed by Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark, changed children's books forever with nonsense, wordplay and logic games that delight adults as much as children.