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Looking-Glass had no such single narrative genesis; its twin structural ideas of the chess game and mirror journey appear to have come from different sources. Reminiscing from the distance of 1932, Alice Liddell claimed the second book, like the enlarged Wonderland, was made up of the ‘many, many stories’ he had told them ‘before the famous trip up the river to Godstow’, ‘particularly the ones to do with chessmen, which are dated by the period when we were excitedly learning chess.’90 In that same year (1932) Dodgson’s cousin Alice Raikes, also a child-friend from the 1860s, provided a rival account. She claimed it was she who had provided the inspiration for the idea of the mirror. While visiting his family in Onslow Square, where she also lived, Dodgson apparently called her over, saying ‘You are another Alice. I’m fond of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling?’ She then followed him into his house and ‘into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner’.

‘Now’, he said, giving me an orange, ‘first tell me which hand you have got that in.’ ‘The right’, I said. ‘Now’, he said, ‘go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the girl you see there has got the orange in.’ After some perplexed consternation, I said, ‘The left hand.’ ‘Exactly’, he said. ‘And how do you explain that?’ I couldn’t explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, ‘If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn’t the orange still be in my right hand?’ I can remember his laugh. ‘Well done, little Alice’, he said. ‘The best answer I’ve had yet.’

I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that this had given him his first idea for Alice Through the Looking-Glass, a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.91

There is no record in his diary of Carroll meeting Alice Raikes before June 1871, by when the text was completed. As reported, his remark that hers was ‘the best answer’ he’d heard ‘yet’ suggests the mirror-game was a standard trick of Dodgson’s and he never credited her directly with being his inspiration, even in her inscribed copy of the book. Incidentally, another correspondent to The Times in February the same year claimed she had furnished Carroll with the idea of the Red Queen turning into ‘the Black Kitten’ at the close.92

The three rival accounts of child friends’ contributions to Through the Looking-Glass are now all part of the legend that has grown up around the composition of Alice. Though they have all come to acquire gospel status in the Carrollian literature, it is worth bearing in mind that they all date from the year of the Carroll centenary over fifty years after its publication and need to be treated with a grain of salt. What is certain is that Alice Liddell, if not the ‘onlie begetter’ of the stories, remained their heroine – and inspiration. Though no longer in communication with her in person, Dodgson made arrangements to send her a presentation copy of Through the Looking-Glass ‘with an oval looking-glass let into the cover’.93 Behind the figure in the mirror of Tenniel’s Alice, or in front of it in this case, stands the face of Alice Liddell.

The letters and diaries of the time tell us nothing about the details of composition, only glimpses of the timetable between conception and completion. By January 1868, after working on it in Ripon, he is asking Macmillan whether he can print a page or two of the new volume ‘in reverse’, which suggests that both ‘Jabberwocky’ and the idea of the looking-glass are settled.94 In his diary for 8 April he refers to it as Looking-Glass House and on 1 November he confirms that he has finally signed up his reluctant illustrator. ‘The second volume of Alice will after all be illustrated by Tenniel, who has reluctantly consented, as his hands are full: I have tried Noel Paton and Proctor in vain.’95 By December the same year he is able to inform Macmillan that he will ‘have a lot of MS ready’96 to set up in proof for the new volume, and he tells