A LARGE gilt-framed mirror claimed to have been the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass is up for sale – for £1m. Well actually, the price includes the house, in Cheltenham, Gloucester, where the mirror has hung since Carroll’s day – but the mirror is the undoubted star.

The link with Carroll, whose real name was Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, is that, with his father, he visited the house, just once, when it was the temporary home of three daughters of a friend of his father. Including Alice Liddell, the girl believed to have been the model for Carroll’s fictional Alice, the sisters had been sent there while their mother had a fourth child.

On this basis, the ornate living room mirror is confidently presented as the one Alice passed through for her further adventures after her escapades in Wonderland. Pish. The inspirational mirror is far more likely to have been one at Whitby. Indeed, the evidence is almost cast-iron.

Starting when he was 22, Carroll made no fewer than six visits to Whitby, always staying at the guest house at No 5, East Terrace – the handsome West Cliff block facing the abbey.

Nor were these stays brief. The first, in 1854, when Carroll was with a group of Oxford students, stretched from July 20 to September 21.

During this Carroll succeeded in having a short story and a poem printed in the Whitby Gazette – his first published writings.

Jackanory-like, Carroll also used to read his stories to children on the beach. Golden sand for almost three miles to Sandsend, this could be where Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter, walking hand in hand, “wept to see such quantities of sand”. But we’ll not push that against a rival claim by Llandudno.

But the gilt mirror is different. In 2001 a Julian Corner, of Newholm, near Whitby, recalled visiting No 5 East Terrace as a child.

It was the home of his grandmother, whose own mother had been Carroll’s landlady.

Mr Corner remembered “an enormous giltframed mirror covering virtually all the wall of the half-landing”. He wrote: “As you climbed the wide and dimly lit staircase the mirror gave the impression of someone walking up the other side. You felt you could go down the other side if only you could get through the mirror.”

Isn’t a mirror on a landing – where the Cheltenham mirror today hangs – more likely to encourage the idea of passing through than a mirror on a living room wall?

But the case for Whitby doesn’t stop there.

Mr Corner’s grandmother said her mother spoke of Carroll writing stories in his bedroom and going down and reading passages to her “for her approval”.

Carroll’s last visit, in 1871, was to attend his brother’s wedding at Sleights. Happily, a plaque on No 5, still welcoming visitors as Barnards Hotel, records the Carroll connection though not the mirror, alas long gone.

Perhaps Barnards should obtain the Cheltenham pretender – price slashed to acknowledge Whitby’s superior claim.

NINETY tomorrow, Doris Day receives a well-earned tribute on Radio Two’s Friday Night is Music Night. I once heard a Day record played on Humphrey Lyttelton’s Best of Jazz programme. Anticipating critics, Humph remarked: “If we want to be really picky about jazz singers who’ve we got? Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. That’s about it.” Discuss.