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a child correspondent that he hopes Tenniel will have the pictures done by the following Christmas. In fact, three more years were to pass before Tenniel, whose hands were indeed full, had completed the pictures and the book was ready for publication. In January 1869, he refers to it as Behind the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, and it was not until March 1870 that Macmillan confirms the final title, endorsing ‘Through’ as ‘just the word’.97 On 4 January 1871, he noted in his diary that he had ‘finished the MS of Through the Looking-Glass’ and on 13 January that ‘nothing remains to be printed but the verses at the end’, adding that ‘the volume has cost me, I think, more trouble than the first, and ought to be equal to it in every way’.98 In April, he records it ‘lingers on though the text is ready’. The first copy of the finished book arrived on 6 December and on 8 December he was finally able to send copies to the Deanery and to await its reception in the wider world.

The success was instantaneous. There were over 7,000 advance orders and by the end of January 1872 it had sold 15,000 copies. Henry Kingsley wrote that ‘it is the finest thing we have had since Martin Chuzzlewit’, and, when he compared it to the earlier book, called it ‘a more excellent song than the other’.99 The Examiner found the sequel ‘hardly as good’ as the original, but praised its ‘wit and humour’ and found it ‘quite good enough to delight every sensible reader of any age’. The Illustrated London News of 16 December described it as ‘quite as rich in humorous whims of fancy, quite as laughable in its queer incidents, as lovable for its pleasant spirit and graceful manner as the wondrous tale of Alice’s former adventures underground’.

If Through the Looking-Glass never won quite the same popularity as the earlier book and never attained quite the same place in most readers’ hearts, it is none the less one of the most successful sequels in literary history. The Hunting of the Snark followed soon after and thereafter Carroll, though he continued to write for another twenty-five years, was never to produce anything of comparable inventiveness or resonance. What he found in Wonderland and through the Looking-Glass during the 1860s he was never to find again.

4: Alice’s Identity

“‘Who in the world am I?’ That’s the great puzzle!”

In the opening chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland we are told Alice is ‘fond of pretending to be two people’, but early in her shape-changing adventures she fears ‘there’s hardly enough of me left to make one comfortable person’. Wondering if she’d been changed in the night, she asks, ‘“Who in the world am I?”’ In a book humming with puzzles, this is probably the greatest puzzle of all for Alice.

It is the question that the best novels and children’s stories return to again and again. If the heroine is at one level the straight guy in a series of bizarre comic turns, at another her adventures compose a miniature Bildungsroman in nonsensical form. It is as if what Harold Bloom called ‘the internalization of the Quest Romance’ in Romantic poetry, with its obsession with questions of identity, were rewritten as a utopian comedy of manners – a combination of Shelley’s Alastor and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The queerness of nonsense language and the bizarre rules and regulations the creatures try to impose on Alice tell us much about the terrifying arbitrariness of the world she has to operate in, but also about who she is. One of the great appeals of the Alice books is that, like Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, they dramatize the puzzling nature of identity in a world dominated by rules and rulers that remain obstinately unpredictable and indecipherable. In one of the early shape-changing scenes in Wonderland, Alice goes to a table to ‘measure herself by it’. There is a sense in which this is what is happening all through both narratives.

In fact, when Alice worries about her identity, she reveals herself to be very much a child of her time and class. In this she is like Alice Lid-dell, the daughter