Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Universally recognised and having, since their publication, been made into a never-ending series of films from Walt Disney to Tim Burton, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass are really timeless children’s classics that still, after many years, hold much joy for adult readers as well as the younger ones. They are rare stories that are multi-generational and hold something that appeals to absolutely everyone. 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Upon lying by a riverbank and being bored into a stupor by her sister’s reading, Alice looks up to see a white rabbit with a pocket watch rushing past her. Curiosity takes the better of her and she decides to follow the rabbit, which soon results in her tumbling down a never-ending rabbit hole and ending up in a wholly remarkable and curious world where food and drink can make her shrink and grow, cats can grin, tea parties are mad, and caterpillars smoke hookah.

Alice Through the Looking-Glass – Whilst playing with her kittens, Alice begins to wonder about the world beyond the living room looking-glass and as she tries to see the world behind the glass, she tumbles headlong into it and discovers it to be a magical place where flowers can talk, poems are real, queens live backwards, and life is a chess game where, with the right moves, she can become a queen. 

Simply written for the younger readers, Alice is not without its satirical, comedic, and sometimes darker and more adult undertones. The fact that Alice attempts to combat the madness around her with logic is Carroll’s little jab at the Puritanism of Victorian bourgeois child-rearing practices. 

Through the Looking-Glass sees the character of Alice return to literature six years after her initial creation. More schematic and structured than Wonderland, this story still harbours the same literary and visual treats as its predecessor and it’s most entertaining to see Carroll create a language that eludes all meaning and logic: in a few of the poems we see Carroll’s “portmanteau words” which are two words fused together to create something else entirely. 

The stories, being filled with very vibrant and incredible characters are ones that must be read and appreciated with the aid of illustrations. The original illustrations were done by Sir John Tenniel, but the book that I have (the one pictured) features illustrations done by Mervyn Peake; the man who brought us the Gormenghast trilogy, and they are something marvellous, bringing a whole new and sometimes slightly darker perception to the story and its characters. 

Now onto a note of film trivia, I have not seen all productions of Alice In Wonderland, surely there are thousands out there in the world. But of the ones that I have seen, I’ve realised that not a really true version of Alice has been made. The movies are combinations of the two books, features that pick out the most visually interesting characters. I’ve concluded that a 1993 version starring Tina Majorino is the closest to the original story whilst Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is more reflective of Through the Looking Glass. Not a major point, I’m just throwing it out there for people who care to take an interest. 

Filled with strikingly memorable characters, comedy, satire, poetry, fantasy, madness, and logic, Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass are both timeless classics that can never grow stale and will always harbour treats for a multi-generational range of readers.