Through the Looking-Glass Quotes by Lewis Carroll: Context & Meanings

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V, “Wool and Water,” printed page 94 / scan leaf 114 in the fully validated 1872 Macmillan first-edition witness on Wikisource. The White Queen explains the impossible rule “jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day,” a linguistic joke about living backwards and “every other day.” It remains fictional nonsense logic rather than practical advice about delayed rewards.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V, “Wool and Water,” printed page 95 / scan leaf 115 in the fully validated 1872 Macmillan first-edition witness on Wikisource. The White Queen calls a memory that only works backwards “a poor sort of memory” while explaining the Looking-Glass world’s comic backwards logic. The line remains fictional character dialogue, not a claim about human memory science.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V, “Wool and Water,” printed page 100 / scan leaf 120 in the fully validated 1872 Macmillan first-edition witness on Wikisource. The White Queen tells Alice that with enough practice she sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. This collection retains its 1871 source-year convention while the evidence witness is title-dated 1872; this remains fictional nonsense-logic rather than Lewis Carroll’s literal theory of belief or instruction to accept impossible claims.