in the game of chess, is made through a series of bewilderingly abrupt and involuntary jumps from place to place and from time to time. Despite the projections of the modern political order of Victorian Britain that shape so much of the looking-glass world, and those archetypal modern settings, the train and the shop, Looking-Glass is haunted by the past – in disconcertingly parodic nonsensical forms. ‘Jabberwocky’, the first poem Alice encounters, is a telegrammatic reductio of a dragon-slaying northern epic, and after her railway journey Alice finds herself in the wood of no names – an eerie place where she loses her own name (‘“and who am I?”’ she wonders) and, during her brief Pan-like communion with the Fawn, her identity as a ‘human child’. Though she recovers her name, she isn’t out of the wood yet. The bulk of the rest of her journey is set against the backdrop of a dark forest that is a legacy of both Spenserean romance and German fairy tales. It is there that she meets a series of characters from traditional nursery rhymes105 – Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and the Unicorn and Humpty Dumpty – and the White Knight, a sad quixotic figure who is both an eccentric inventor (like Dodgson) and a travesty of the heroic Pre-Raphaelite medievalism of Rossetti, Morris and the Laureate’s Idylls of the King (Tenniel’s frontispiece illustration of the White Knight guys the lumbering pictorial medievalizing of Sir Isumbras at the Ford in the same vein). Through the Looking-Glass has some affinity with the Gothic revivalism of Pugin’s Houses of Parliament and, nearer home for Dodgson, the fake antique frescos recently designed for the Oxford Union, but revels in its own nonsensical anachronism. Even as the book takes us through the iconography of the chivalric and royal past – Humpty Dumpty characteristically assumes Alice has read about him in a ‘History of England’ and the Lion and the Unicorn survive in the royal coat of arms – its conversational style, manners and tone are unmistakably modern. In Through the Looking-Glass, Tenniel dresses Alice in the newly fashionable hair-band and striped stockings of her time, and the author always presents her as a thoroughly contemporary girl. Though the story veers back and forth between past and present as dizzily as Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, Alice’s final coronation banquet is clearly represented in the text and illustrations as a Victorian dinner party, complete with decanters and soup tureens. The text ends with a Dunciad-like apocalypse of that hierarchical social world, as the story dissolves in Alice’s final impatient gesture of revolt.
“I ca’n’t stand this any longer!” she cried, as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.
Alice’s protest is against the irrational nonsense of the mad chess game she has dreamed she is part of – with its comic, but potentially threatening, dream logic. To re-establish her own identity and her faith in the real world of social conduct, she has to reject the awful travesty of proper social life played out by the Queens, Kings and subjects of the Looking-Glass world. Despite his subsequent canonization by the Surrealists, Dodgson was a Euclidean logician, a pious Christian and a political conservative, whose life was fanatically devoted to tidiness and order. Alice mirrors him in this. Nevertheless, it is possible to read her dream adventures as a protest against the world of governesses, teachers, bullies and pedagogues, and all the social rituals they impose on her. The hall-of-mirrors discovered in the Looking-Glass inevitably reflects back on the world of the Victorian drawing-room, school-room and play-room, and the ordinary assumptions of a comfortable middle-class childhood this side of the mirror.
‘Who dreamed it?’ asks the last chapter, and the book’s dream realism is clearly a reflection of the fictional Alice’s waking world. It can also be read as a reflection of the real Alice Liddell’s domestic universe,