Through the Looking-Glass
By the time Lewis Carroll wrote Through the Looking-Glass, in 1871—140 years ago this month—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was already a beloved book. So the pressure was on; Carroll faced a real “follow-that problem.” His difficulty was increased because of his estrangement from Alice Liddell’s family, and anyway, the “real” Alice was six years older, had grown up. The Alice of the books is such an individual girl—opinionated, bossy, always telling people off, even though she’s in a world she doesn’t understand, in which she doesn’t even know what size she is—that it’s hard not to believe she was modeled on a real girl, but now that model was gone and Carroll had only his memory of that lost original. “Still she haunts me, phantomwise,” he wrote in the book’s epilogue, and thank goodness she did, because Through the Looking-Glass was anything but an anticlimax, giving us the Jabberwock, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the Walrus and the Carpenter to add to Carroll’s pantheon of magnificently nonsensical immortals.
I thought about Lewis Carroll when I began writing my second children’s book, Luka and the Fire of Life, 20 years after the earlier Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I was worried about the “follow-that problem,” too, and it comforted me that a writer I admired so greatly overcame his (far greater) problem with such brilliant flair.