Through the Looking-Glass

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a novel published in December 1871 by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865. The chess game that governs the book is played across its chapters, so the moves the characters make are part of the arrangement rather than decoration.

The book mirrors the earlier one structurally. The first novel begins outdoors in May, uses changes in size as a plot device and draws on playing cards; this one opens indoors on a wintry night exactly six months later, uses changes in time and direction as its device, and draws on chess. The mirror themes of opposites and time running backwards are therefore built into the form rather than added to it.

As in the earlier book, Alice enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a looking-glass. It was published in December 1871 and dated 1872, and it is generally placed with fairy tales rather than with the novel proper.