Through the Looking-Glass: Anthropomorphism 2 key examples

Humpty Dumpty is still a well-known nursery rhyme character today. At the time Carroll was writing, there were many versions of the poem about Humpty Dumpty circulating, largely by word-of-mouth. In fact, the poem started as a riddle about what Humpty Dumpty was (the answer was "an egg"). This is one of the more dream-like experiences Alice has while moving across the chess board. The egg is not Humpty Dumpty to begin with, but rather transforms impossibly before her eyes from a regular chicken egg into a human-like creature with "eyes and a nose and mouth." This is the kind of impossible transformation that can only happen in the imagination. What's more, as they begin to speak, Alice is able to start reciting the version of the Humpty Dumpty story she knows. Like other characters Alice meets (the Kings, Queens, and Knights, Haigha and Hatta), Humpty Dumpty alludes to something familiar to Alice outside of the Looking-Glass World. This is not just an instance of Carroll inserting an allusion to a riddle into the story for the reader's benefit, but also of Alice's imagination inserting an allusion into her own dream. The way Carroll—and Alice herself—is able to make ideas and inanimate objects come alive in the Looking-Glass World suggests an affinity between writers and imaginative children. This affinity is yet another example of a looking-glass inversion: children can imagine entire worlds around themselves, and writers are constantly striving to be as powerful at imagination as they are.

Alice has been doing her best to be a gracious host, but she never quite seems to know how to perform this role properly. She asks questions and adapts to what the other Queens tell her about what she must do, but she keeps accidentally violating social rules and making people angry. She already got in trouble for trying to slice into a mutton leg that turned out to be alive. In this passage, the "guests lying down in the dishes" and the "soup-ladle [...] walking up the table towards Alice's chair" represent a total dissolution of the rules of reality. The soup ladle ought to be a tool with which Alice can serve her guests. Instead, the ladle turns into a human-like creature that can walk up the table to confront Alice. Meanwhile, instead of soup, the dishes now contain dinner guests. There is no way Alice can keep hosting a dinner party in these conditions. She doesn't know whether "serving a guest" means putting food on their plate or scooping them out onto a plate. There is not even anything she can use to serve them because it would be terribly rude to use an anthropomorphic ladle. It is a person, after all!

Anthropomorphism makes this scene comical and helps Carroll make a point about the impossibility of understanding and following all the rules of etiquette. Additionally, the way inanimate objects and dinner guests become indistinguishable represents the strangeness of turning from a child into an adult. In Alice's world, children are treated for the most part as objects who do not merit the same kind of respect as adults. But everyone grows up: there seems to be some indistinct point of transition when a child turns from an object into a full person. Alice struggles to find exactly when, how, or why this transition happens. Especially given how silly many adults act, it is incomprehensible to her why the simple fact of adulthood makes someone respectable or ready to lay down their own rules. This conundrum is eventually what becomes too much for her to accept, and she wakes up.