Alice Through the "Looking Glass Book":Carroll's Use of Children's Literature as a Ground for Reversal in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There Ronald Reichertz (bio) The tradition of the Looking Glass Book plays an important structural and thematic role in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Yet a survey of the critical responses to this fantasy reveals that Alice's passage through the physical looking glass and its attendant reversals have received a great deal of critical attention, while Alice's simultaneous passage through the tradition of the Looking Glass Book has been virtually ignored. My purpose here is to locate this tradition, particularly as it developed in the Looking Glass Book for children, in Carroll's fantasy and to demonstrate how it functions to introduce children's literature as a ground of reversal that works together with the more obvious physical reversals. Further, I will demonstrate how these literary reversals help to create Alice's oxymoronic delight and confusion in Looking Glass Land by contrasting them with the literary materials used to produce like effects in Wonderland. Finally, I will suggest how this contrast supports the possibility that the fantasy structures of the two Alice Books mirror each other. In "Looking Glass House," the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Alice plays a game of "let's pretend" with her uncooperative kitten: "Let's pretend that you're the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you'd look exactly like her. Now do try, there's a dear!" And Alice got the Red Queen off the table, and set it before the kitten as a model for it to imitate: however,the thing didn't succeed, principally, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn't fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass that it might see how sulky it was,"—and if you're not good directly," she added, "I'll put you through into the Looking-glass House. How would you like that?" (180, my italics except for last word) Indoors on a snowy November day, Alice plays a didactic game in which she becomes the authoritative and correcting adult in relation to her awkward and mischievous kitten. Imitation is the center of this game. Imitating adult treatment of her own behavior, Alice uses a positive model to try to get her kitten to "become" the Red Queen; and, when her kitten refuses, Alice attempts to correct its "sulky" behavior by holding it up to a mirror as a negative model. In a general way this fantasy-frame play works to establish the logic of the following fantasy. For example, it sets up the important structural chessboard topography and casts some of the characters that "people" the fantasy. But, more specifically, Alice's didactic "let's pretend" also introduces the logic of the Looking Glass Book for children, an introduction that adds an important ground for reversal to the more obvious physical mirror that has drawn concentrated attention from Carroll's critics. The Looking Glass Book for children, closely related to the long history of Looking Glass Books, uses narrative as an exemplary mirror that teaches through either positive models or admonishment. The early history of the Looking Glass Book in England is thoroughly worked out by Herbert Grabes in The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance. Grabes lists hundreds of works that employ mirror-imagery as "title-metaphor" and develops a typology that includes informational, exemplary, prognostic and fantasy mirrors (42-66). The Looking Glass Book for children grew out of the exemplary mirror book at the beginning of the period of sustained and self-conscious production of books for children in the middle of the seventeenth century. The first such titled book especially written for children was Abraham Chear's A Looking Glass for Children (1673), a book with a clearly religious, didactic intention realized through stories that work as positive examples or admonishments. The use of the title formula continued...