Through the Looking-Glass "An Un-birthday Present"

Lewis Carroll

"An Un-birthday Present"

Context: The Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, and for his children's classics, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, whose heroine is his young friend Alice Liddell. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice peers through a mirror and, by imagining herself in the reflected image, begins her adventures in Looking-Glass House, where chessmen live in a kingdom marked off as a giant chessboard. Alice meets the large legendary egg, Humpty Dumpty; and when she compliments his cravat, he is pleased and states that it is a gift of the White King and Queen:

"They gave it me," Humpty Dumpty continued thoughtfully as he crossed one knee over the other and clasped his hands round it, "they gave it me–for an un-birthday present."