Through the Looking-Glass

Lewis Carroll, 1871

Children's classics

Alice's games with a kitten lead towards a world organised by mirrors, language and chess.

Read the book Contents

Listen free: the LibriVox audiobook, read by volunteers.

Length: 13 chapters
Reading time: About 2 hr 2 min
Words: 29,094

About the book

Alice begins among domestic things, talking to a kitten and imagining what might lie beyond the looking-glass. The next stage of her exploration turns ordinary movement into a puzzle, with paths that do not lead where she expects.

Carroll makes rules both essential and unreliable in this second Alice adventure. Familiar words, social exchanges and games acquire unfamiliar consequences, while Alice tries to find a sensible position within them. The interest lies in following her practical responses to a world whose inhabitants often treat the most peculiar arrangements as entirely reasonable.

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Children's classics

This edition

Text from Standard Ebooks, who proofread and typeset it and dedicate their edition to the public domain. Lewis Carroll died more than 70 years ago, so the work is out of copyright in the UK. Includes the original the chess game, epigraph, frontispiece.