Book review: Alice Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion

After the Through the Looking Glass Sesquicentenary Conference that took place in 2021 in York (UK), a call for papers went out for a ‘companion’ publication to “Through the Looking-Glass”. Just as the conference had covered a broad range of aspects of the ‘Looking-Glass’ story, this companion’s objective would be to reflect the breadth of themes in the story, its cultural and adaptation history, and its ongoing relevance today.

It took several years, but the results of that call for papers have now finally been published in “Alice Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion”, edited by Franziska Kohlt and Justine Houyaux. The book consists of an impressive 516 pages and contains no less than 38 essays by 42 authors!

The book claims to offer “a truly interdisciplinary exploration of the polymathic influences that shaped Through the Looking-Glass, the lesser explored sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. And indeed it addresses a very diverse range of topics: the essays are classified and organised in sections like “natural philosophy”, “religion and spirituality”, “psychology”, “publishing, adapting, and commercialization”, “popular culture and intertextuality”, and many more. (For a full table of contents, see the site of the publisher.)

In that aspect, it resembles the book “Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as seen through the critics’ looking-glasses” by Robert Phillips, which was published in 1971 – 100 years after the publication of “Through the Looking-Glass”. That book is a collection of essays that attempts to gather “the most interesting, if not always most illuminating, interpretations” of Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books on topics like philosophy, language, Freudian, Jungian and psychedelic interpretations, and comparisons with other writers. The difference is that “Alice Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion” specifically focuses on Carroll’s second ‘Alice’ book (although “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” does get mentioned in some of the articles) and contains never before published articles that have been written specifically for this book, instead of a critical selection of existing essays in an attempt to cover certain topics.

Did the book succeed in its endeavour? Well, that is rather hard to determine, because it is hard to exactly pinpoint the endeavour. The book certainly presents ‘an interdisciplinary exploration’, but this is ofcourse quite a broad definition of its goal. The introduction of the book attempts to provide more focus, but takes up a whopping 13 pages in trying to communicate the intention and content of this book, which shows that it is difficult to sum up it’s purpose and approach. It tells us among others that the book will ‘explore through a polymathic approach what shaped Carroll’s mind and influenced the narrative choices that ultimately came to constitute this book’, that it ‘attempts to reconstruct the intellectual environment from which Through the Looking-Glass emerged’ and that it ‘illuminates the book’s intellectual scope and scope of social and societal concerns, through Carroll’s multifaceted interests and areas of impact on Victorian culture’. Which seems very pretty, but is rather hard to understand! Eventually, I derived from it that the book’s purpose is twofold:

1. Serve as a reappreciation of “Through the Looking-Glass”, by offering the first comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of this book;
2. Showcase an array of state-of-the-field methodologies and put all kinds of different people into dialogue.

I myself would describe the book as a collection of essays that look at “Through the Looking-Glass” from many different perspectives, with different intentions. Some essays consider the story from a philosophical, religious or linguistic perspective. Some essays try to give meaning to the story, for example by explaining it as a device to teach children the basic lessons from Aristotle’s logic and ethics. Other essays describe how the book influenced others, for example how it may have led to the creation of psychological and sociological theories, and to other books, movies, and translations. Not all essays are direct interpretations of “Through the Looking-Glass”: there are some that interpret the interpretations of others, for example by analysing illustrations from artists other than John Tenniel to investigate the reflections of identity in Carroll’s books.

As mentioned before, the book is categorized into sections, that contain 2 to 4 essays each. The eclectic variety of topics apparently made it hard to categorise them, as I was often surprised at the type of essays I encountered in a certain section. Like the White Knight’s song, the list of contents probably only conveys what the name of the section is called, not what the name of the section is, let alone what the essays actually are. For example, I did not expect essays about French translations, types of editions, as well as Savile Clarke’s play under the section name “Publishing, Adapting, and Commercialization”. “Visualizing Looking-Glass” definitely turned out to have a completely different meaning than “Illustrating Looking-Glass“, and while there is a section called “Poetry”, there is also a separate section about “Jabberwocky”.

The readability of the essays varies. Some are very scholarly and require a strong reading level in the English language, others are more accessible. Some are quite dry, others are more entertaining. Some are abundantly illustrated, others do not contain illustrations at all. As it is impossible to review all 38 essays individually here, I will try to provide an overall account of the book, and only specifically name the ones that stood out most to me. Ofcourse, everyone has different interests, and essays that appealed to me, may not appeal to others at all, and vice versa.

“Alice Through the Looking-Glass” contains many interesting articles, like “‘Which is to be master?’, Humpty Dumpty and the Philosophy of Language”, that discusses Dumpty’s statements about language and how these and Carroll’s opinions about language do or do not align with the approach of 19th century language studies and more recent discussions about language. The added value of some others is debatable: it is hard to imagine how mapping “Through the Looking-Glass” into charts through data visualization is an interesting undertaking for people other than the author, and although the essay (or “chapter-poem-visual essay-report”, according to its author) that provides “illustrated observation reports on [the author’s] 2-year-old son Lucian’s interactions with Humpty Dumpty between August 2021 and March 2022” is charming, I’m not sure how this sheds new light on the story.

I appreciate essays that make a clear point, with a proper conclusion. Not all succeed in doing that. I found the essay “Gödel, Einstein, Carroll: Parallels and Crossovers”, which vaguely identifies personal and work-related connections between Carroll and the others, to be the most confusing one. It is mostly a collection of individual statements, lacking reasoning and theoretical foundation. It reads like a series of associations, as if the author is giving you a live insight into his train of thought. However, this ‘raving on a writing desk’ seems to be an exception and most essays are well structured and substantiated, like “Must a name mean something?: Theological Evolution in Through the Looking-Glass Expressed through Victorian Broad Church Philology”.

An essay that was surprisingly refreshing in both subject and perspective, was “The Alice Code: Looking-Glass Thinking for Innovators”. It is written from a marketing and branding company perspective instead of a scholarly perspective, and presents the ‘Alice’ books as a framework that companies can use to generate new, innovative ideas for consumer products, by making a comparison between the stories and the techniques they use in daily practice. Delightfully different!

I mostly appreciated the last two essays, “Tweedledum’s Commentary: In Appreciation of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter'” and “The Fishy Riddles of Through the Looking-Glass“, as both are well written and especially the first one was one of the few essays that actually provided me with a better understanding of the story (in this case, the poem).

Combining this many essays from authors with different backgrounds (some are well-known and respected Carrollians, others I had not heard from before) and with obvious different writing experience into one volume must have been hard for the editors. They added footnotes to some essays that refer to other essays for a more in-depth take on the subject, in an attempt to make the book a more coherent whole. I am curious whether all essays that were submitted made it into the final publication or if there was a selection process, and I also wonder how much the essays have been edited to make them fit in.

All in all, the book does not succeed in accomplishing all the things stated in its introduction, as this would have required all essays to focus on Carroll’s actual writing, his interests, and the Victorian context. However, a collection like this does have its merits in its own way. When looking at the two goals of the book that I defined in the beginning of this post, I conclude that it has indeed succeeded in showcasing the many ways “Through the Looking-Glass” still occupies the minds of people on different topics and perspectives, that it does somewhat provide a platform (or at least offers a stimulus) for all kinds of people to get into dialogue, and that it most certainly contributes to a reappreciation of Carroll’s second ‘Alice’ story. I am most happy to see a new publication coming to light that focuses on “Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there”, as I agree that this masterpiece is too often neglected! Only the claim that it offers a ‘comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration’ may be a bit pretentious, because I feel the essays mostly offer stand-alone perspectives on a random variety of topics instead of forming a comprehensive approach. I would therefore think that “a tribute” would be a more suitable subtitle for the book than “a companion”.

Book launch and availability

“Alice Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion” will be officially launched on September 27 in Christh Church, Oxford (UK). You can attend the event if you want!

If you would like to get your own copy, you can order it from Amazon (in paperback or Kindle edition) or from the publisher (in paperback or ebook (PDF / ePub) edition). (For a scholarly work like this, it is surprisingly affordable with a price of only £28, making it also accessible to the less die-hard academically engaged fans!)