Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Through The Looking Glass: Chapter 12: Which Dreamed It?
Through The Looking Glass: Chapter 12: Which Dreamed It?
M.A English
Ms. Tapti Roy
16 November, 2017
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an
English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer. His most
famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, which
includes the poem "Jabberwocky", and the poem The Hunting of the Snark all examples of
the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy.
Through the Looking-Glass is a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Set some six
months later than the earlier book, Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by
climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. Through the Looking-
Glass includes such celebrated verses as "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter",
and the episode involving Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
In the last chapter we find Alice back at home in England, rubbing her eyes, apparently
waking from a dream. Alice tells Kitty, who was sitting in her lap, that she was with her
throughout the dream. She speculates about cats' tendency to purr, and she cries out her
frustration with trying to figure out what is being said when the same noise is repeated over
and over. Alice then picks up the Red Queen from the table and tries to get Kitty to admit that
she was the Red Queen, but Kitty does not seem to want to look at the chess piece. She looks
over at Snowdrop, who is still having her cleaning from Dinah, and she concludes that the
White Queen must have been so disheveled in her dream for this reason. She believes that
Dinah must have been Humpty Dumpty.
Finally, Alice wonders who was dreaming all along. She believes that she might have
been the one dreaming or it could have been the Red King, since she was convinced that she
had been a part of his dream bringing us back to the conversation she had with Tweedledum
and Tweedledee. The narrator concludes by asking the reader who they think was dreaming