Classic
Through the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll
Summary
Alice climbs through a mirror into a world laid out like a giant chessboard, where she must travel square by square to become a queen, meeting Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Knight along the way. Carroll structures the nonsense with chess logic and fills it with poems, including Jabberwocky, that play games with language itself. The sequel deepens the wit of the first Alice book and gave English some of its most quoted nonsense verse.
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Historical Context & Significance
Carroll published the book in 1871 as a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and it matched the original's enormous popularity. Its inventions, from Jabberwocky to Humpty Dumpty's theory of words, remain fixtures of the language.