Get to know one of Wonderland’s most loved characters a little better
With midsummer upon us, and London’s V&A Museum’s Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition newly opened, we took some time in our July issue to consider a few life lessons from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
There’s sage advice in there for everyone, from always eating the cake, to not boring people about your cat, to (of course) staying curious.
In that spirit of curiosity, we decided to do a little digging into lesser-known aspects of Wonderland. So here, for your curiosity, is an introduction to the Real Mad Hatter.
Of course, the first thing to know is that Lewis Carroll never described him as the ‘Mad’ Hatter at all, only ‘Hatter’. But who was this mysterious millinered man?
Well, he was probably a chap called Theophilius Carter, who was also not a hatter but a purveyor of furniture with a shop at 48-49 High Street, Oxford and had possibly been at the same Oxford college as Carroll at the same time.
He was known as a local oddball who used to stand around outside his shop wearing a top hat at a rather rakish angle on the back of his head, and looking generally a bit unusual. It’s been asserted that John Tenniel, who illustrated the original Alice book, came to Oxford for the purpose of drawing him from life without his knowledge, though there’s no record of this being the case. Apparently, Tenniel’s illustrations are an uncanny likeness, however, of his rather obvious chin and juglandaceous face
Whether he was mad or not, is unclear but he was certainly an eccentric and also invented the ‘alarm clock bed’, a hare-brained contraption that would wake the sleeper by dropping him into a bath of cold water. Now, that would have successfully roused that sleeping dormouse. The alarm clock bed was shown at The Great Exhibition of 1851, apparently.
And, should you be interested in the answer to the Hatter’s riddle to Alice: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?“, the answer is that it isn’t; Carroll intended it as a bit of meaningless nonsense. However, several people have since suggested that the answer might be “Because Edgar Allen Poe wrote on both”. So now you know.
