The Wasp in a Wig: A 'Suppressed' Episode of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

Now more than one hundred years after Lewis Carroll's immortal "Through the Looking-Glass" was published, lovers of the "Alice" books have a new episode written by Carroll in which Alice meets an aged, bad-tempered wasp who wears a yellow wig. The episode, which was originally intended to follow the White Knight sequence in Chapter VIII, is rich in Carrollian humor, nonsense, and wordplay; and it contains a five-stanza poem referencing the yellow wig. According to Martin Gardner, the discovery and publication of "The Wasp in a Wig" is an event of great significance not only for Carrollians but for anyone interested in language, humor, the adventures of Alice or, for that matter, wasps.