Alice Through the Looking-Glass

Franziska E. Kohlt and Justine Houyaux

Introduction

‘Alice in Wonderland’ is, unquestionably, one of the most popular books ever written. However, what is popularly referred to as ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is really two books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.¹ The distinction between the two has often become blurred, and, as a result, so have discussions of the works. When the prolific amounts of literary criticism discuss ‘Alice’, they more often focus on Wonderland than Looking-Glass; and when Looking-Glass is treated separately, it is not infrequently with bewilderment, or unfavourably. That the two books are somehow different has been implicitly accepted. As a poll by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America indicated, Carrollians seem to fall into two categories: #TeamLookingGlass or #TeamWonderland, in almost equal proportions² (as, indeed, do the two editors of the present collection³).

Notably, the same sense of bewilderment at the ‘difference’ between Wonderland and Looking-Glass is replicated and progressively made more pronounced in the discussion of works of the author following the Alice books, such as Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. The matter of ‘difference’ also arises in response to Carroll’s non-literary writing, from mathematics, science, theology, or on the theatre, which are – like Looking-Glass – often called ‘too serious’, and thus unlike ‘Alice’ – ‘Alice’ meaning Wonderland. Granting Through the Looking-Glass a dedicated volume, a fuller re-appreciation as a work in its own right in this context sheds new light on this ‘difference’: as one of degree, rather than one of kind. Looking-Glass now appears as a significant stepping stone in the development of ‘Lewis Carroll’, his ideas, and his way of presenting them in literary form, as it reflects more candidly the many strands of inquiry that preoccupied the polymathic mind of its creator – no longer a self-funded first-time author, but that of a best-selling, budding franchise. What exactly shaped this mind, and influenced the narrative choices that ultimately came to constitute this so-often neglected ‘Alice sequel’, is what this volume aims to explore through a like-mindedly polymathic approach.

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This book is the result of an invitation to continue many fertile discussions of the international, online Through the Looking-Glass Sesquicentenary conference that had sought to revisit in 2021 the ‘second Alice book’ in this spirit. The conference called for re-approaching the work from traditional angles, such as through Victorian and children’s literature studies,but also new directions in scholarship and newly prominent interdisciplinary fields of study, such as the Environmental and Medical Humanities and posthumanism. Most of all, it aimed to address the historical and intellectual contexts from which the work emerged from as many as possible of the array of fields in which its author was interested, and to which he contributed, both as Lewis Carroll and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: the mathematician, clergyman, amateur scientist, theatre, music and art enthusiast, deep thinker, and vocal participant in Victorian intellectual and social discourse. This would illuminate whether and how these fields and the debates within them found representation in his texts, and whether that had any connection to the way they have been read and adapted across the past 150 years. Ultimately, the conference was curious to investigate when, and for what reasons, we had arrived at the situation we set out from: how it was that Looking-Glass started blending into ‘Alice in Wonderland’, but also appeared as so different. As a result, the chapters in this collection open up a fresh and kaleidoscopic perspective into a book deliberately different in nature and approach to its predecessor, with a distinct impact within the afterlife of Alice, facilitating fresh ways to rethink the latter in turn.

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Through the Looking-Glass followed the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1871, and is, strictly speaking, the third of the Alice books. ‘Alice’ was originally told as a series of extemporized fairy-tale episodes, most famously on a boat trip in Oxford on 4 July 1862, by mathematical tutor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in the company of his colleague, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and three of the daughters of Henry George Liddell: Lorina, Edith, and Alice. Although a prolific storyteller, ‘Lewis Carroll’⁴ had never written down a story of this length before and did so only after Alice made this request of him. The manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under-Ground was gifted to her two years later. The publication followed only after a number of endorsements and encouragement, amongst others by Greville MacDonald, son of Scottish author, educator, clergyman, and scientist George MacDonald. After Wonderland proved a success, its publisher Alexander Macmillan, who had already been responsible for the publication of an earlier fantastic fairy tale about a child conversing with animals and fantastic creatures – Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1862–1863) – encouraged Carroll to write a sequel. Not only did this result in an ‘Alice sequel’ but, with Carroll continuing to publish with Macmillan for the rest of his life, also a ‘fourth’ Alice – The Nursery Alice (1890), as well as a reprint of the manuscript of ‘Alice’s Adventures Under-Ground’. This potted publication history is significant for the present reconsideration of Looking-Glass. Even the difference between that earliest manuscript version of Alice – a much shorter and simpler story, missing many of the now-famous scenes, such as the Mad Tea-Party – highlights, amongst others, the differences between Dodgson as a private and public storyteller. It marks also another oft-neglected history of Alice, responsible for many of the later books’ features: the beginning of Alice’s commercialization.

Through the Looking-Glass was, after some uncertainty, illustrated once more by John Tenniel, with whom dealings were at times tense – so much so that Carroll had compiled a list of possible other illustrators, should Tenniel decline (these included William Schwenck Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame). It is in such mundane practicalities of the publication process we find clues as to the rich and often-mystified history of the book and its writer. The Tenniel-Carroll relationship was notably to blame for the omission of an entire chapter – ‘The Wasp in a Wig’. The link to Gilbert hints at Carroll’s connectedness, both personally and intellectually, to Victorian culture in ways that bust the myth of the shy and isolated Oxford don, and cast Alice as the product of, and in correspondence with, many facets of Victorian culture, in the context of which the works have yet to be more fully explored. It was thus not only Gilbert but also Sullivan with whom Carroll had corresponded about having his books set to music for the stage. As his diaries show, Carroll was an admirer of both Sullivan’s comedic and religious compositions. This reveals Carroll, perhaps unsurprisingly, as a connoisseur of Victorian comedy and visual culture, but perhaps more surprisingly to some, of Anglican religious culture – and a type of stage entertainment frowned upon by segments of it, with which biography could quickly otherwise affiliate him.⁵

Such nuances illuminate, firstly, the multiform influences upon Carroll and, secondly, about where, in the much larger picture, he would sit within this discourse – a picture much more complex than the label of ‘children’s literature’ and its often retrospectively imposed limits presume. But it is these complex contexts that connect the Alice books to a wide range of fields within Victorian culture, their concerns and internal debates, and situate its author and works within them, in such a way as to shine a light on where content was not only determined by ideas and ideals but also practical audience and marketing-oriented considerations.

Carroll had at this point in life formed influential friendships, notably, for instance, with many artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He had developed a love of theatre and music: well-documented (cf. Lovett 1989; Foulkes 2019; Wakeling 2015), but only recently the focus of historicist literary scholarship (cf. Wakeling 2015; Vaclavik 2020; Richards 2023),again, however, with a lesser focus on Looking-Glass. Recent work of this kind has also focused on hitherto even less-discussed topics of paramount importance to Carroll himself, such as his religion (Lovett 2022; Gardiner 2020), and his interest in the sciences (Shuttleworth 2014; Kohlt 2016; Beer 2016), which had been regarded as antithesis to his religion (White 2019). A more integrated view of Alice’s portrayals of the natural world and its inhabitants has shed new light on Carroll’s fairy-tale settings (Talairach 2014; Bown 2001; Keene 2015). Focusing, however, again largely on Wonderland, these have nonetheless succeeded in indicating how intimately linked Science and Religion were in Victorian publishing (see Lightman 2007; Secord 1885; Fyfe 2000; Topham 2007) and the much richer environments as part of which they invite us to discuss Carroll, Looking-Glass and their afterlives – a part of them, not apart from them.

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This edited collection thus undertakes the significant attempt of reconstructing the intellectual environment from which Looking-Glass emerged – straddling also how that factors into Looking-Glass’s reception history, as both distinct from and intermingled with that of Wonderland, or ‘Alice’.

It will make a significant intervention into the study of one of the world’s most popular books and pop culture phenomena by ambitiously reframing the nature and territories of the scholarly discussion around ‘Alice’ through a re-exploration of its less-explored sequel. It places Looking-Glass centre-stage and illuminates through Carroll’s multifaceted interests and areas of impact in Victorian culture the book’s intellectual scope, and scope of social and societal concerns, which have hitherto not been comprehensively explored. It invites scholars and practitioners from these fields of Carroll’s interests to enrich the discussion of the literary subject with knowledge from their respective disciplines. Investigating thus also Looking-Glass’s history of adaptation and commercialization, beginning in Carroll’s lifetime, and spanning to the present, it will draw out hitherto glanced-over connections between the concerns of the books and their adaptations. This will shed new light on the reasons for ‘Alice’s’ seemingly perpetual and universal popularity, and why the books seem so uniquely suited for adaptation in such a wide range of media, expressing an even wider range of issues refracted through these adaptations (this book will cover it as an engagement with subjects as diverse as AI, ontology, and sexual abuse). This will be enhanced by juxtaposing some of these scholarly analyses with some artists’ own reflections on their engagements with the work.

Our book will thus fulfil two purposes: it is, firstly, a re-appreciation of Through the Looking-Glass, and through it one of the most popular books and franchises of all time, and the first comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of its kind in Carroll studies. As such, it marks a departure from the psychoanalytic methods that have dominated many of the efforts of past edited collections of literary analyses of Alice. It will, secondly, showcase an array of state-of-the-field methodologies and put into dialogue scholars and discourses, the public and practitioners, writers and audiences, breaking down frequently assumed boundaries, rivalries, or mutual exclusivity of fields. Mirroring the circumstances of Alice’s genesis, this book thus hopes to model the possibilities of transdisciplinary humanities studies, aspiring to be not only a Companion to the rediscovery of Alice but also other literary works, and the central place still occupied by popular narrative in public discourse. It thus hopes to appeal to scholars, practitioners, and teachers, alike: breaking new ground as a concise case study mapping scholarly paradigm shifts in interdisciplinary and applied literary studies, knowledge exchange, and public engagement.

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The book is structured by the different disciplinary fields it explores. Part I sets the scene, beginning with Alice’s ‘environment’, reconsidered through Victorian Natural History.

Talairach draws links between Looking-Glass’s portrayal of Nature, as both familiar and unfamiliar, to the culture of Victorian menageries, zoological gardens, and museums as sites of renegotiation of taxonomies, and through them, social and biological hierarchies. As Natural History was a foremost vehicle of learning and education, and one often involving, perhaps counter-intuitively today, fairies, Allen re-assesses if Alice is really merely ‘delicious nonsense’, or if, and if so what, Alice learns on her journey. Fagan and Witen re-approach Looking-Glass as a proto-post-humanist work, taking seriously the potentially behaviour-changing impact Carroll may have foreseen for his work and how it is modelled in his narrative play and subversion of conventional child–animal and child–plant encounters.

Such considerations firmly position Carroll and Alice at the heart of Victorian scientific and moral discourse, of which Alice has often been claimed to be morally and otherwise agnostic. Engaging with scientific references in Looking-Glass in their historical and cultural context, however, reveals a different, more nuanced picture of a socially and morally engaged author. That this squares with both, the ‘serious’ dedicated anti-vivisectionist Charles Dodgson, and children’s entertainer, the clergyman-logician, and fairy-tale author will be illuminated, in Part II, which focuses on Natural Philosophy.

Kohlt documents how Carroll grew up immersed in Victorian optical culture, which, with its ‘philosophical toys’ and their accompanying literature, aimed to be edifying and entertaining, and consciously modelled his narratives on it, mirroring its themes and images – in Looking-Glass and already in Wonderland. McLeish considers Carroll in comparison to his friend and polymathically minded kindred spirit, George MacDonald, and their reflections upon the imagination. How it was these polymathic roots of Looking-Glass that made it a medium through which to consider complex scientific and mathematical problems is examined by Schilero. He shows how Carroll’s polymathically informed literary writing provided a language for Einstein and Gödel’s discussions of paradoxical, unimaginable science, illuminating the work’s reception history beyond the literary. The chapters of this section, collectively, challenge not only the Carroll-Dodgson ‘split personality’ theories, but also complicate ‘two cultures’ and ‘conflict theory’ approaches – of science and humanities, science and fantasy, or science and religion.

This prepares the discussion of the topic most important to Carroll, his life and thought: the subject of religion. Consciously positioned alongside the science chapters, the authors in Part III will approach them not as opposites, but, as understood by Carroll and many others, as complementary paths to truth (cf. Dixon 2008; McGrath 2007; Ungureanu 2019). Picking up the thread from the Natural History, Gardiner considers, once more, the Looking-Glass Insects and their naming from a theological perspective, and thus also the postcolonial dimension of the re-naming of ‘exotic’ fauna. Considering, once more, alongside Carroll and MacDonald, and the use of mirrors in Looking-Glass and Lilith, Rawleigh gets to the heart of Carroll’s literary use of the Looking-Glass, the mirror, as Biblical: as an instrument facilitating reflection upon questions of knowledge in discourses as complex as that of science, nature, and moral thought and action within, and in relation to them.

Both Gardiner and Rawleigh shed light on what ultimately alienated Dodgson from the established churches of his time, driving him from high to broad Church affiliation (Lovett 2022), and abandoning a primary clerical career. Alongside Gabelman, whose Theology of Nonsense (2016) laid the foundations for much of the debate around the faith of (so-called) children’s writers, and the ‘serious’ use of ‘nonsense’ within it, they reposition Carroll’s Alice as a contribution to this literature – an alternative pursuit of his clerical endeavour. How spiritual and religious literature outside the High Church Anglican canon contributed to the formation of this is further illuminated by Brown. Her discussion of Carroll’s interest in the spiritualism of John Dee and Francis Bacon also notes how references to it in Looking-Glass, in turn, made it a medium for contemporary writers wishing to explore such questions further.

Closing in on the ultimately psychological function of the mirror, Part IV moves from Carroll’s own interest in the mind and the history of the mind-mirror metaphor, as pertaining to the soul and its health, to how Carroll’s literary adaptation of it could encapsulate it in such ways as to be applicable beyond its literary confines. Flynn discusses how Carroll’s investment in the nascent science of psychology and fascination with dreamingwas shapedespecially by the newly flourishing periodical market. Schaefer-Salins, tantalizingly, juxtaposes this historical account with a survey of Looking-Glass’s afterlife in the literature of psychological theory, in which it has been, unusually, more prevalent than its predecessor. Coates and Coalville carry us across the threshold of history and theory, illustrating how in marketing psychology ‘Looking-Glass thinking’ practically assists innovators in thinking up ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ to productively displace them mentally beyond the constraints of time, space, language, science, and other inconvenient practicalities.

As language is Carroll’s main vehicle to convey the aims he envisaged for his work, it becomes necessary to reframe Carroll’s reading and own work on logic and language in Part V. Further strengthening the connection between Alice and Carroll’s pedagogic writing and practice, Gerlach analyses the narrative progression of Looking-Glass as a mirroring of the stages of Aristotle’s Logic and Carroll’s novel as a mnemonic: a teaching tool, pre-dating his later Logic teaching works for children, such as the Game of Logic. Where such mediations of truth via language placed Carroll in relation to his contemporaries is the subject of Savenije, who, focusing on Humpty Dumpty’s attitudes on language, situates Carroll among linguist-logicians of his time, and those he later influenced, uncovering another of Looking-Glass’s distinct afterlives.

The following sections now shift their gaze more firmly on the afterlives of Looking-Glass through considering various forms of its adaptation. Once more considering the practical dimensions of publishing and marketing, Part VI begins to map, and thus locate, the history of the blurring of Wonderland and Looking-Glass in this context. Offering a translation of an unpublished essay on Lewis Carroll by surrealist Louis Aragon, Houyaux illuminates frictions between text, translation, and artistic license in the practice of translation as a form of popularization. How artistic and marketing choices deprioritize text and meanings is mapped in detail by Amanda Lastoria, who traces the history of repackaging Looking-Glass as a Wonderland sequel in multi-volume or combined editions. In the first comprehensive history of Looking-Glass’s stage adaptations, Richards and Imholtz illustrate further the extent to which textual accuracy and fidelity to the text gave way to income-generating spectacle. Newly devised songs, dances, and additional scenes for extending the stage time of celebrity actorspre-emptwhat would half a century later become a commonplace in such adaptations as Disney’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, in which the two books become one.

Taking a step back in Part VII, de Nobriga deconstructs the text into its building blocks through the theme of choices. Theorizing the insights of earlier chapters through the methods of data visualization, she shows how Looking-Glass can become adaptable in different contexts – offering a unique perspective into the intersections of categories otherwise considered separately. A creative engagement with the infinity loop of childhood engagement with Humpty Dumpty, his popular culture variations, and his own creative contribution, Paxman’s visual essay reflects on the building blocks and choices in the process of one such path of creative adaptation.

Recapturing the theme of the earlier chapter, of Looking-Glass’s more mature notes, Part VIII considers the legacy of illustrating Looking-Glass. Dillon shows how Benjamin Lacombe’s illustrations re-interpret it as an exploration of pubescent female identity and Mitchell’s photography as a transgression of female boundaries, to offer a more specific take on Looking-Glass both being more mature and conveying the process of maturing. Pereira’s comparative analysis of international illustrators’ takes on the moment Alice steps through the mirror and further draws out varying interpretations of the work as commentary on becoming and transcendence to examine what beliefs, choices, and historical contexts are reflected in these images. This is, finally, viewed through the eyes of an illustrator, as Peliano reflects on the philosophical and professional preoccupations of fellow Looking-Glass illustrators, from Švankmajer to Kusama, and herself.

Having considered the historical and philosophical contexts, the marketing and visual culture dimensions of Looking-Glass prepare a different framework to the subsequent literary engagements with it – in Part IX, ‘Before Carroll’, and Part X, ‘Beyond Carroll’. Arnavas’s history of the mirror as fairy tale symbol and its Victorian remediations resonates with psychological considerations of earlier essays when, considering Alice’s actions in relation to female agency in such earlier texts. Khan further draws out concerns of female agency by juxtaposing Looking-Glass with mirror-themed works of Tennyson, whom Carroll admired. Together, these chapters tease out the satirical and wish-fulfilling potential of the dream-mirror that becomes crucial in the age of modernism and Freud, discussed in Part X, where Martin, Magri da Rocha and Rapucci, and Yin cast their gaze beyond Carroll, at postmodern adaptations in UK, US, and Chinese-American literature. Through similarly contextual, biographical, and historical readings, the works of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Grace Lin become the product of their cultural contexts, but also co-production of childhood cultures and their authors’ participation in it. Martin recapturing the earlier theme of optical apparatus determining literary form and narrative in Dorothy Sayers in a way parallel to Carroll’s Looking Glass as product of optical culture – Carroll emerges, here, as proto-modernist in the way he envisaged his books’ practical materiality, their application in society, as more-than-a-book.

This prefaces, penultimately, the reconsideration of the global, multi- and transmedial setting of pop culture, film and graphic novel, video games, and fashion, in which Alice’s overwhelming presence has been widely acknowledged (Brooker 2004; Kohlt 2012; Vaclavik 2018). Is it possible to discern a distinct role for Looking-Glass in this afterlife? Bevington, Cherry, and Gibson examine three intriguing subjects through which to address this question. Bevington sheds light on the Looking-Glass references in Garland’s AI thriller Ex Machina (2013) and its themes of individual, human choice, the possibility of free will, and ambiguity of moral ideals within certain cultural contexts. Her discussion gains richness through prior chapters’ discussions of science, religion, and colonialism, exemplifying how this book can be put into dialogue with historical contexts and contemporary applications, to shed new light on how Alice can function so effectively in such apparently unrelated settings. The semiotic flexibility of Looking-Glass’s mirror, as relating to the theme of maturity and maturing, is instrumental in its addressing of psychologically traumatic childhood abuse and its impact on identity in Cherry’s chapter on Lost Girls (2006). That Looking-Glass has been read as, and thus attracts, more ‘serious’ philosophical discussions, becomes even clearer when Gibson turns to the prolific, and only apparently non-distinct use of Alice references in the Matrix franchise, where she identifies Looking-Glass imagery as ‘doing the heavy lifting’.

As has been the case with ‘Alice’, overall, one part of Looking-Glass in particular has developed a life of its own, to which the book’s final two sections turn, by addressing its poems and paramount poetic achievement: ‘Jabberwocky’.

Kelen interrogates ‘Jabberwocky’ as Carrollian synecdoche and as a text impossible to translate, decipher, and understand, and yet endlessly tempting translators to do so, as emblematic of Carroll’s writing. Kérchy contextualizes this struggle for semiosis, alongside the Jabberwock’s kindred Carrollian cryptid, the Snark: an embodiment of vanishing, nothingness, and elusiveness, yet pursued for infinity, whose echoes in the global history of translations are surveyed by Sundmark.

The relevance of those questions of translation and transmediation is made palpable from the perspective of the translator and that of the poet, asLa Mura and Roberts walk readers through the thought processes behind their original pieces presented here: a new Italian translation of ‘Jabberwocky’, and four new parodies of it – a rare insight into their minds at work.

In keeping with the theme of poetry, and coming full circle by returning to the shores of the natural world from which this book set off, the final two chapters of Part XI reflect on the distinct legacy of Looking-Glass’s poetry. Both focus on ‘fishy’ subjects, that is, seaside-themed poetry, and reinterrogate the function of this site as one of moral transformation from which these poems derive their political, satirical sharpness, and their potential for didactic and moral commentary. Demakos and Susina reframe Carroll’s nonsense poetry, his humour, as instrumental, not contradictory to his ‘serious’ interest in Logic and Truth. As an exercise in sense-making by the logician Lewis Carroll, ever seeking to hold the mirror up to society and individuals, to confront them with the deceptions of realities, these poems, ultimately, encapsulate what Looking-Glass enacted and facilitated: a ‘seeing through’ what lies beyond its appearances.

The book comes full circle in more than one way. It will have reinvestigated Looking-Glass in its own right, but also provided a stepping stone to Carroll’s later works – a key to his life, work, and thought. It will have circled through Carroll’s preoccupations with the numerous aspects of contemporary intellectual discourse, his remediations of them, and those adaptations, which, through Carroll’s imagery, navigate kindred concerns in their own times. By having honed in on elements that have previously unsettled or inhibited criticism of Looking-Glass, and by acknowledging and contextualizing them through historical perspectives, facilitated by transdisciplinary modes of scholarship, this book discerns ways in which Carroll’s texts were truly innovative, even radical, interventions into Victorian children’s literature intellectual discourse, while at the same time keenly aware of their conventions.