‘Which Alice book do you prefer?’ a writer once asked me. ‘Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass?’ He maintained that all readers could be divided into two types: those who loved the playing-card world of Wonderland and those who preferred the chessboard landscape of Through the Looking-Glass.
It is a difficult choice. Both books are full of Carroll’s fantastic characters, beautifully illustrated by Sir John Tenniel. I’ve always loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – the white rabbit with his immaculate waistcoat and fobwatch, the Madhatter’s tea party and the Mock Turtle’s songs. Through the Looking-Glass, on the other hand, has Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty and the wonderful White Knight.
Like Tenniel, Lewis Carroll’s superb illustrator, I am a political cartoonist and I have often borrowed the great man’s creations, ‘with apologies to Tenniel’, in my cartoons. I’ve drawn government ministers as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, several prime ministers as Humpty Dumpty falling off high walls and, once, an iron lady on the White Knight’s horse.
In many ways Through the Looking-Glass is a mirror image of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The first book begins outdoors, beside a river on a warm summer’s day, while Through the Looking-Glass begins indoors, in a sitting room on a cold winter’s night six months later. In Wonderland Alice grows and shrinks in size, while in the Looking-Glass world time moves backwards and Alice has to run at full pelt to stay in one place. As the Red Queen tells her, ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you need to run at least twice as fast as that!’ Later the White Queen explains that the advantage of living backwards is that the memory works both ways and that she can remember things that happened the week after next, for instance: ‘There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished; and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday; and of course the crime comes last of all.’ The King’s messenger is a familiar face from Wonderland.
Both worlds are absurd and funny, but it is the poems that make Through the Looking-Glass so special for me. This book includes two of the greatest nonsense poems ever written. In ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ two absurd characters wander along the seashore with smartly dressed oysters tripping along behind them:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat –
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn’t any feet.
The Walrus charms the oysters with my favourite lines in the poem:
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.’
I’ve drawn my fair share of winged pigs as a cartoonist.
But what makes Through the Looking-Glass a classic is the short poem in mirror-writing in the very first chapter. Alice holds it up to the looking-glass in order to read ‘Jabberwocky’. The nonsense words it contains have made their way into the English language – ‘chortled’, ‘burbled’, ‘whiffling’ and, of course, ‘galumphing’. Other words light up the imagination like fireworks:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,
Did gyre and gamble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
If you want to know what that means, try Humpty Dumpty’s explanations in chapter six.
So, in answer to that writer’s question, I think I’d have to choose the back-to-front chessboard world of Through the Looking-Glass where, brillig or not, I’d happily gyre and gimble in the wabe until those mome raths finally outgrabe.