Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll’s 1871 fantasy novel follows Alice into a mirror-world organized as a chessboard, where she advances from pawn to queen.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy novel follows Alice through a rabbit hole into a world of strange creatures and shifting rules. Its earlier Alice adventure shares characters and dreamlike logic but uses a different structure.
Alice: The child protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, known for entering strange worlds and questioning their customs. Her pawn-like journey structures the novel’s movement from the first square to the final rank.
Lewis Carroll: The pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English writer, mathematician, and photographer who lived from 1832 to 1898. Carroll wrote the novel and shaped its puzzles, poems, and comic logic.
Jabberwocky (poem): A nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll about a young hero who kills the Jabberwock. Its invented vocabulary became one of the novel’s most widely quoted passages.
Chess: A two-player strategy game in which opposing armies move across an eight-by-eight board to checkmate the king. The novel maps Alice’s progress onto chess moves across a field of squares.
Chess problem: A composed chess position posing a task, such as finding checkmate in a specified number of moves. Carroll framed the novel’s chess scheme with a problem-like diagram and a sequence of moves.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: An English mathematician, logician, photographer, and author known publicly as Lewis Carroll. His mathematical interests inform the book’s games with rules and logical paradox.
Portmanteau word: A word formed by blending parts of two or more words and combining their meanings. Humpty Dumpty’s explanation of “chortle” and “galumphing” helped popularize this sense of portmanteau.
Looking-glass world: A fictional realm accessed through a mirror, where familiar surroundings and rules appear reversed or transformed. The mirror-world supplies the novel’s setting and its inversions of ordinary logic.
Red King: A sleeping chess-piece character in Through the Looking-Glass, whose dream becomes a subject of debate. The Red King’s dream raises the novel’s central uncertainty about who imagines whom.