In the popular novel "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll, was Alice in the images imaginary or real?

As Lewis helps us to imagine a girl visualizing a world through a magnifying glass and finding distortions to reality, he uses a variety of images. Through the looking glass, the scene is backwards, oddly sized, and not at all ordinary. In fact, images in a looking glass are virtual images. We note in reading the book that when the oddities are occurring is when Alice is the person in the magical land on the other side of the looking glass. In this sense, she is not the Alice doing the looking, but instead the Alice being observed. The Alice doing the looking is real, whereas the Alice in the land being observed is imaginary.

With a magnifying glass in your hand, you can modify the positions of the object you're observing and the distance of the glass from your eye to vary the images you see. As you get the glass really close to your eye, you can sometimes see a bit of your face imposed upon the images viewed on the other side of the lens. It's a fun experience and Lewis Carroll obviously spent some time doing just that to get ideas for his novel. With that particular set of circumstances, physics studies of light will differentiate between a "real" and a "virtual" image. Alice's image when she is the one being observed is not a "real" image, but instead a "virtual" one; one that is not real and cannot be projected onto a screen.

The novel has been described many ways with various mysteries to behold. The simplest one is that when observed, Alice is imaginary.