Audiobook · read by volunteers
Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
Read by Brad Bush, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Betsie Bush, Chip, Kristen McQuillin, Alessia, Alice Elizabeth Still, Robert Garrison, Marlo Dianne, Peter Yearsley · 10 chapters · 3 h 19
About the book
Alice is back, and this time she steps through the mirror above the fireplace into a house where everything is backward. The Looking-Glass world is laid out like a chessboard, and she is determined to cross it and become a queen. On the way she meets talking flowers, twin brothers who love a quarrel, a knight who falls off his horse, a White Queen who remembers the future and, of course, Humpty Dumpty, who can make words mean whatever he likes. Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is just as funny, just as strange and in many ways sharper, with riddles, poems and nursery rhymes turned upside down. Ten LibriVox readers share its ten chapters, about three and a quarter hours of wit and wonder. Nonsense with a serious sparkle.
Introduction
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There appeared at the end of 1871, with 1872 on its title page, as the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Its author, Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, lived from 1832 to 1898 and taught mathematics at Oxford. He wrote the Alice books for a young friend, Alice Liddell, and her sisters, and the stories grew into some of the most famous in the English language.
Where Wonderland was modelled on a pack of cards, the second book follows the pattern of a game of chess. Alice begins as a pawn and, with each move across the board, meets new characters, many of them drawn from nursery rhymes and traditional riddles. The land is full of fabulous creatures and rhyming figures, such as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Walrus and the Carpenter, and the Lion and the Unicorn. Humpty Dumpty lectures her on the meaning of words, and the book also contains the nonsense poem Jabberwocky, one of the most celebrated poems of its kind.
Carroll's logic is playful but rigorous, and the book rewards a close ear for puns, parodies and philosophical jokes. At the same time it has a quiet melancholy: Alice is growing up, and the looking-glass world is both a delight and a place where things slip away.
The recording has ten chapters and lasts about three and a quarter hours, with ten LibriVox volunteers sharing the reading. It is a charming choice for family listening and for adults who want to rediscover a childhood favourite. It is also a lovely reminder of how much a good sequel can add to a well-known world.
Public domain
Lewis Carroll died in 1898: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text