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: