George MacDonald was an important influence on Carroll's work. MacDonald was a poet, author and Christian minister. He wrote fantasy and fairy tales and influenced several other famous authors. This passage from his novel Phantastes illustrates the extent of his influence on Through the Looking Glass:
"What a strange thing a mirror is! And what a wondrous affinity exists between it and a man's imagination! For this room of mine, as I behold it in the glass, is the same and yet not the same. It is not the mere representation of the room I live in, but it looks just as if I were reading about it in a story I like. All its commonnes has disappeared. The mirror has lifted it out of the region of fact into the realms of art...I should like to live in that room if I could only get into it."
