Through the Looking-Glass, a curious country

Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871 as a sequel to the first Alice book. Its landscape is a chessboard and the plot follows a chess problem. Carroll printed the problem and its moves at the front of the book. John Tenniel drew the pictures again and asked for one chapter to be dropped. The full text is on Project Gutenberg.

Where this text comes fromAlice is standing still and looking, which in this book means she is reading a board. The landscape she sees is divided by brooks and hedges into squares, and the whole plot moves across it the way pieces move in a chess problem, so the description is also a diagram. Carroll expects the reader to notice the shape without being told, and the passage gives the geometry before it gives any reaction to it. What you copy is the moment of taking it in, before she works out what it means.

What you might not noticeThe word country is joined to the word that follows it by a long dash with no space on either side, so the sentence changes direction mid stride rather than pausing first. Source

What it trainsTwo sentences carry fifty-nine words, so the average is close to thirty and neither one lets go early. Three commas are all the internal punctuation there is, apart from one long dash that sits inside a word pair with no spaces around it. That dash is the thing to get right: on screen it is the plain hyphen beside your zero key, and no other mark of that shape appears in the whole passage. Three capital letters in 337 characters, only one of them inside a sentence. The longest word is directions, ten letters.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg