Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There was published by Macmillan and Co. in 1871 (dated 1872), again with illustrations by John Tenniel. It is the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and in many ways its superior: darker, more structurally disciplined, and more philosophically complex.
Where Wonderland was organized by dream logic (one episode following another without connection), Looking-Glass is structured as a chess game — Alice begins as a White Pawn and advances across the board to become a Queen. This formal constraint gives the narrative direction that Wonderland lacked, and the chess metaphor deepens the novel’s concern with rules: chess is a world entirely governed by rules, but the rules produce situations that appear arbitrary and absurd to someone who doesn’t understand them — precisely the condition of a child in an adult world.
The characters introduced here have proved as durable as those of the first book: Tweedledum and Tweedledee (identical yet perpetually quarreling), Humpty Dumpty (who insists that words mean what he chooses them to mean), the White Knight (Carroll’s tender self-portrait as a bumbling, kind inventor), and the Red Queen (who must run constantly just to stay in place — a metaphor that has entered the language of evolutionary biology).
“Jabberwocky” — the nonsense poem that opens the book — is perhaps the most famous example of how syntax can create meaning in the absence of semantics. We understand the poem’s narrative (a hero kills a monster) despite understanding almost none of its words.
Collecting Through the Looking-Glass
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1871 [1872]): Red cloth binding, matching Wonderland.
Market values:
- First edition, first issue: $3,000–$15,000
- Good condition: $1,500–$5,000
- Pair with matching Wonderland first: $25,000–$80,000
- Later Victorian editions: $200–$800