Curiouser and
Curiouser
As Alice through the Looking Glass LTD launch their fi rst boutique in London’s West End, Emma McClelland talks to its founders, Jo Humphris and Jake Frior, about giant rabbits, children’s classics and Sir John Tenniel’s iconic chess board
So goes the opening stanza of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, the poem discovered by Alice having stepped through a looking glass one snowy winter evening. Alice T rough the Looking Glass is the sequel to Alice in Wonderland and it is just as surreal and wonderful as the original. Amongst the story’s themes is fate, which Carroll represents using the metaphor of a chess game. T e movement of pieces is symbolic of the steps we all take towards our destinies on the journey of life. T e game is the backbone of the story and it drives the action forward. It is perhaps for this reason that Sir John Tenniel, the original illustrator of the Alice books, hand-painted a chessboard fringed with images from the popular children’s story. Until now, the survival of the chessboard has been completely undocumented. It was only when Jake Frior, a rare bookseller and
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was Brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe.
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