MAD ABOUT TEA

I'm really fond of a nice cuppa and on a recent visit to Oxford - sometime home of Lewis Carroll and birthplace of 'Alice' - I picked up a rather particular tea-bag...


An odd souvenir, I know, but that's me...

Now, some of you may recall my boring you about this before but there's actually no such character as the MAD HATTER.

Yes, yes, I agree that's what people call him - and the film magazines have recently been carrying photos of Johnny Depp (right) who will be playing the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's forthcoming film of the book - but Lewis Carroll never calls him the Mad Hatter - not once!

The author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland only ever speaks about him as "the Hatter".

What's more, Carroll never refers to that curious afternoon's entertainment that the Hatter presides over as 'The Mad Hatter's Tea-Party'.

Don't believe me? Check out Chapter Seven and you'll find it's entitled 'A Mad Tea-Party' - no Hatter's.

You'll also find that it was held in the garden of the March Hare's house, so it really, absolutely wasn't the Hatter's tea-party!


Where then does the Hatter's damaging reputation for madness come from? Well, it seems that it's all down to the word of a CAT... What's more, a Cheshire Cat...

'In that direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, 'lives a Hatter: and in that direction,' waving the other paw, 'lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'


'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you ca'n't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

So, there you are: the only reason we have for calling the Hatter 'Mad' is because we're told he's mad --- and by a character, please note, who not only believes that he's mad himself but that everyone else is mad as well.

There is, of course, a saying (coined long before Lewis Carroll's time): 'As mad as a hatter', the origin of which is somewhat vague...

The felt used in hat-making was 'cured' with the use of mercury and prolonged inhalation of the fumes frequently led to mercury poisoning, resulting in such neurological damage as confused speech and distorted vision. It was a regrettable side-effect of the millinery trade and often brought about an early death.

However, the symptoms of mercury poisoning are 'excessive timidity, diffidence, increasing shyness, loss of self-confidence, anxiety, and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive,' which doesn't sound even remotely like the bombastic bully encountered by Alice.

There is a further theory that Lewis Carroll based the Hatter on Theophilus Carter, a former servitor at Lewis Carroll's college, Christ Church, who invented an alarm clock bed, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, that tipped out the sleeper at waking-up time!

That certainly sounds pretty mad but his alleged reputation for being referred to in Oxford as 'The Mad Hatter' derives from the fact that he later owned a furniture shop and is said to have been in the habit of standing in the door of his shop wearing a top hat.

Not the maddest behaviour you've ever come across, I'll bet. Nevertheless, legend has it that the illustrator of Alice's Adventures, Sir John Tenniel (right), travelled to Oxford especially to sketch him for his pictures of the Hatter.

This, however, seems amazingly unlikely since when Lewis Carroll's alter-ego - mathematics don Charles Dodgson - suggested a child who might serve as an artist's model for Alice, Tenniel retorted that he no more needed a model to draw a child that Mr Dodgson needed a set of mathematical tables to work out his sums!

So, is it really feasible that Tenniel would have bothered to take the train from London to Oxford simply in order to sketch the local furniture-shop-man? I think not!

Finally, an observation on that price tag of 10/6 (ten-shillings-and-six-pence in British pre-decimal currency) that Carroll never mentioned but which Tenniel added to the Hatter's topper and which virtually all subsequent illustrators (and most filmmakers) have felt obliged to copy...


This sum - half-a guinea - suggests that it was quite an expensive titfer and it has been calculated that if one were able to purchase it today it would cost £72 or $105!

Anyway, Hatters are popping up all over the place just now, blog-friend, Good Dog sent me this cover art by Dustin Nguyen for the DC comic, Batman Detective Comics issue #841, showing the Masked Crusader attending a wacky Wonderland tea-party where the Hatter (inspired by an illustration by Arthur Rackham) sports a topper that, at only 8/11, is a tad cheaper than Tenniel's headgear!

Click image to enlarge

For more information on those tea-bags that got me started on all this, visit The Mad Hatter Tea Company.