And I just want to talk to you about the hatter. It is evident that he has a changeable mood and is aggressive, but… why? The term “mad hatter” has long been used as a symbol of madness, however, this meaning has been altered by the character who has been part of Carroll’s stories, Walt’s animation and Tim Burton’s feature film.
The reason for his madness is his profession, because in the 19th century hats were an important part of people’s attire, so their manufacture was necessary. The fur was separated from the skin of the animals by a method called carroting, for which mercury was elemental. The problem is that contact with this substance causes antisocial behavior, mood swings, aggression and tremors, in other words: Mad Hatter’s disease.
In 1829 Blackwood’s Edinburgh magazine made reference to this term for the first time. A few years later, in 1835, the Canadian writer Thomas Haliburton would talk about it in his book The Clockmaker. Later it was Lewis Carroll who gave this madness to one of the characters in Alice In Wonderland, a book he wrote in 1865 with graphic help from the illustrator John Tenniel.
But the truth is that the hatters were not always crazy, because before their mood was disturbed by the use of mercury, they used camel urine to separate the fur from the skin of the animals, and thus be able to create different designs of this curious accessory.
Another possible origin of the phrase “mad as a hatter” takes us to New Zealand, where miners were known as hatters and reached madness after many days of working in the dark. Loneliness can make us crazy, that is a fact, but it seems that this was not the origin of the hatter’s madness, since the stories that Carroll put on paper are older than this New Zealand term.
There is also a possibility that the original phrase was: “as mad as an adder”, which comes from the American saying “as mad as a cut snake”. However, it is unlikely that the hat craze was born from the anger of a snake, so the most likely source remains the excess of mercury in the bodies of those whose job it was to design and make hats.
We know that 10/6 of the hat is due to its price, that the peculiar personality and madness of the hat is due to the use of mercury to be able to exercise its trade. Let us remember that in Wonderland there are hundreds of elements that tell us about a world that is turned upside down: concoctions and cakes that alter the size, clams that are kidnapped by a walrus that seeks to eat them, animals that speak, among other events that sometimes we seem not to understand. However, the Mad Hatter’s madness is well justified and was not just a figment of Lewis Carroll’s imagination.
happy happy not birthday