“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone: “so I ca’n’t take more.”
“You mean you ca’n’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.
“Who’s making personal remarks now?” the Hatter asked triumphantly.
Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her question. “Why did they live at the bottom of a well?”
The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said “It was a treacle-well.”
“There’s no such thing!” Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and the March Hare went “Sh! Sh!” and the Dormouse sulkily remarked “If you ca’n’t be civil, you’d better finish the story for yourself.”
“No, please go on!” Alice said very humbly. “I wo’n’t interrupt you again. I dare say there may be one.”
“One, indeed!” said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. “And so these three little sisters—they were learning to draw, you know—”
“What did they draw?” said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.
“Treacle,” said the Dormouse, without considering at all, this time.
“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”
He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse’s place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change; and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk-jug into his plate.
Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously: “But I don’t understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?”
“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?”
“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark.
“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse: “well in.”
This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.
“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—”
“Why with an M?” said Alice.
“Why not?” said the March Hare.13
Alice was silent.
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’14—did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness!”
“Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, “I don’t think—”
“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.
This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off: the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.15
“At any rate I’ll never go there again!” said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!”16
Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading right into it. “That’s very curious!” she thought. “But everything’s curious to-day. I think I may as well go in at once.” And in she went.
Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass table. “Now, I’ll manage better this time,” she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she set to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and then—she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.
1. There is good reason to believe that Tenniel adopted a suggestion of Carroll’s that he draw the Hatter to resemble one Theophilus Carter, a furniture dealer near Oxford (and no grounds whatever for the widespread belief at the time that the Hatter was a burlesque of Prime Minister Gladstone). Carter was known in the area as the Mad Hatter, partly because he always wore a top hat and partly because of his eccentric ideas. His invention of an “alarm clock bed” that woke the sleeper by tossing him out on the floor (it was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851) may help explain why Carroll’s Hatter is so concerned with time as well as with arousing a sleepy dormouse. One notes also that items of furniture—table, armchair, writing desk—are prominent in this episode.
The Hatter, Hare, and Dormouse do not appear in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground; the entire chapter was a later addition to the tale. The Hare and Hatter reappear as the King’s messengers, Haigha and Hatta, in Chapter 6 of Through the Looking-Glass. In Paramount’s 1933 motion picture of Alice, Edward Everett Horton was the Hatter, Charles Ruggles the March Hare. Ed Wynn supplied the Hatter’s voice in Walt Disney’s 1951 animation, and Jerry Colonna spoke the part of the Hare.
“It is impossible to describe Bertrand Russell,” writes Norbert Wiener in Chapter 14 of his autobiography Ex-Prodigy, “except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter…the caricature of Tenniel almost argues an anticipation on the part of the artist.” Wiener goes on to point out the likenesses of philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and G. E. Moore, two of Russell’s fellow dons at Cambridge, to the Dormouse and March Hare respectively. The three men were known in the community as the Mad Tea Party of Trinity.
Ellis Hillman, writing on “Who Was the Mad Hatter?” in Jabberwocky (Winter 1973), provides a new candidate: Samuel Ogden, a Manchester hatter known as “Mad Sam,” who in 1814 designed a special hat for the czar of Russia when he visited London.
Hillman also conjectures that “Mad Hatter,” if the H is dropped, sounds like “Mad Adder.” This, he writes, could be taken as describing a mathematician, such as Carroll himself, or perhaps Charles Babbage, a Cambridge mathematician widely regarded as slightly mad in his efforts to build a complicated mechanical calculating machine.
Hugh Rawson, in Devious Derivations (1994) writes that Thackeray used the phrase “mad as a hatter” in Pendennis (1849). So did Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Nova Scotia judge, in The Clockmaker (1837): “Sister Sal…walked out of the room, as mad as a hatter.”
2. The British dormouse is a tree-living rodent that resembles a small squirrel much more than it does a mouse. The name is from the Latin dormire, to sleep, and has reference to the animal’s habit of winter hibernation. Unlike the squirrel, the dormouse is nocturnal, so that even in May (the month of Alice’s adventure) it remains in a torpid state throughout the day. In Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti (1906) we are told that the dormouse may have been modeled after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s pet wombat, which had a habit of sleeping on the table. Carroll knew all the Rossettis and occasionally visited them.
Dr. Selwyn Goodacre noticed that the dormouse is sexless at the tea party, but is revealed as male in Chapter 11.
A British correspondent, J. Little, sent me the stamp shown below which pictures the British dormouse as an endangered species. The stamp was issued in January 1998.
3. Both Carroll and Tenniel apparently forgot that a milk jug was also on the table. We know this because later on in the tea party the Dormouse upsets it.
4. In Under the Quizzing Glass, R. B. Shaberm
an and Denis Crutch point out that no one would tell a Victorian little girl that her hair was too long, but the remark would apply to Carroll. In Isa Bowman’s The Story of Lewis Carroll (J. M. Dent, 1899), the actress and former child-friend recalls: “Lewis Carroll was a man of medium height. When I knew him his hair was silvery-grey, rather longer than it was the fashion to wear, and his eyes were a deep blue.”
5. The Mad Hatter’s famous unanswered riddle was the object of much parlor speculation in Carroll’s time. His own answer (given in a new preface that he wrote for the 1896 edition) is as follows:
Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.
Other answers have been proposed, notably by Sam Loyd the American puzzle genius, in his posthumous Cyclopedia of Puzzles (1914), page 114. In keeping with Carroll’s alliterative style Loyd offers as his best solution: because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes. Other Loyd suggestions: because Poe wrote on both; bills and tales are among their characteristics; because they both stand on their legs, conceal their steels (steals), and ought to be made to shut up.
In 1989 England’s Lewis Carroll Society announced a contest for new answers, to be published eventually in the society’s newsletter, Bandersnatch.
Aldous Huxley, writing on “Ravens and Writing Desks” (Vanity Fair, September 1928), supplies two nonsense answers: because there’s a b in both, and because there’s an n in neither. James Michie sent a similar answer: because each begins with e. Huxley defends the view that such metaphysical questions as: Does God exist? Do we have free will? Why is there suffering? are as meaningless as the Mad Hatter’s question—“nonsensical riddles, questions not about reality but about words.”
“Both have quills dipped in ink” was suggested by reader David B. Jodrey, Jr. Cyril Pearson, in his undated Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book, suggests, “Because it slopes with a flap.”
Denis Crutch (Jabberwocky, Winter 1976) reported an astonishing discovery. In the 1896 edition of Alice, Carroll wrote a new preface in which he gave what he considered the best answer to the riddle: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front.” Note the spelling of “never” as “nevar.” Carroll clearly intended to spell “raven” backwards. The word was corrected to “never” in all later printings, perhaps by an editor who fancied he had caught a printer’s error. Because Carroll died soon after this “correction” destroyed the ingenuity of his answer, the original spelling was never restored. Whether Carroll was aware of the damage done to his clever answer is not known.
In 1991 The Spectator, in England, asked for answers to the Hatter’s riddle as its competition No. 1683. The winners, listed on July 6, are as follows:
Because without them both Brave New World could not have been written.
(Roy Davenport)
Because one has flapping fits and the other fitting flaps.
(Peter Veale)
Because one is good for writing books and the other better for biting rooks.
(George Simmers)
Because a writing-desk is a rest for pens and a raven is a pest for wrens.
(Tony Weston)
Because “raven” contains five letters, which you might equally well expect to find in a writing-desk.
(Roger Baresel)
Because they are both used to carri-on de-composition.
(Noel Petty)
Because they both tend to present unkind bills.
(M.R. Macintyre)
Because they both have a flap in oak.
(J. Tebbutt)
Here are two more answers by Francis Huxley, author of The Raven and the Writing Desk (1976):
Because it bodes ill for owed bills.
Because they each contain a river—Neva and Esk.
6. Alice’s remark that the day is the fourth, coupled with the previous chapter’s revelation that the month is May, establishes the date of Alice’s underground adventure as May 4. May 4, 1852, was Alice Liddell’s birthday. She was ten in 1862, the year Carroll first told and recorded the story, but her age in the story is almost certainly seven (see Chapter 1, Note 1, of Through the Looking-Glass). On the last page of the hand-lettered manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which Carroll gave to Alice, he pasted a photograph of her that he had taken in 1859, when she was seven.
In his book The White Knight, A. L. Taylor reports that on May 4, 1862, there was exactly two days’ difference between the lunar and calendar months. This, Taylor argues, suggests that the Mad Hatter’s watch ran on lunar time and accounts for his remark that his watch is “two days wrong.” If Wonderland is near the earth’s center, Taylor points out, the position of the sun would be useless for time-telling, whereas phases of the moon remain unambiguous. The conjecture is also supported by the close connection of “lunar” with “lunacy,” but it is hard to believe that Carroll had all this in mind.
7. An even funnier watch is the Outlandish Watch owned by the German professor in Chapter 23 of Sylvie and Bruno. Setting its hands back in time has the result of setting events themselves back to the time indicated by the hands; an interesting anticipation of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. But that is not all. Pressing a “reversal peg” on the Outlandish Watch starts events moving backward; a kind of looking-glass reversal of time’s linear dimension.
One is reminded also of an earlier piece by Carroll in which he proves that a stopped clock is more accurate than one that loses a minute a day. The first clock is exactly right twice every twenty-four hours, whereas the other clock is exactly right only once in two years. “You might go on to ask,” Carroll adds, “‘How am I to know when eight o’clock does come? My clock will not tell me.’ Be patient: you know that when eight o’clock comes your clock is right; very good; then your rule is this: keep your eyes fixed on the clock and the very moment it is right it will be eight o’clock.”
8. The Hatter’s song parodies the first verse of Jane Taylor’s well-known poem, “The Star.”
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveller in the dark
Thanks you for your tiny spark:
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye
Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark
Lights the traveller in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Carroll’s burlesque may contain what professional comics call an “inside joke.” Bartholomew Price, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Oxford and a good friend of Carroll’s, was known among his students by the nickname “The Bat.” His lectures no doubt had a way of soaring high above the heads of his listeners.
Carroll’s parody may also owe something to an incident that Helmut Gernsheim recounts in Lewis Carroll: Photographer (Chanticleer, 1949):
At Christ Church the usually staid don relaxed in the company of little visitors to his large suite of rooms—a veritable children’s paradise. There was a wonderful array of dolls and toys, a distorting mirror, a clockwork bear, and a flying bat made by him. This latter was the cause of much embarrassment when, on a hot s
ummer afternoon, after circling the room several times, it suddenly flew out of the window and landed on a tea-tray which a college servant was just carrying across Tom Quad. Startled by this strange apparition, he dropped the tray with a great clatter.
9. “Murdering the time”: Mangling the song’s meter.
10. This was written before five-o’clock tea had become the general custom in England. It was intended to refer to the fact that the Liddells sometimes served tea at six o’clock, the children’s suppertime. Arthur Stanley Eddington, as well as less distinguished writers on relativity theory, have compared the Mad Tea Party, where it is always six o’clock, with that portion of De Sitter’s model of the cosmos in which time stands eternally still. (See Chapter 10 of Eddington’s Space Time and Gravitation.)
11. The three little sisters are the three Liddell sisters. Elsie is L.C. (Lorina Charlotte), Tillie refers to Edith’s family nickname Matilda, and Lacie is an anagram of Alice.
This is the second time that Carroll has punned on the word “Liddell.” His first play with the sound similarity of “Liddell” and “little” is in the first stanza of his prefatory poem where “little” is used three times to refer to the “cruel Three” of the next stanza. We know how “Liddell” was pronounced because in Carroll’s day the students at Oxford composed the following couplet:
I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell.
She plays the first, and I the second fiddle.
For some reason Tenniel did not draw the three sisters. Peter Newell’s picture of them at the bottom of the well is on page 90 of my More Annotated Alice.
12. Treacle is British for “molasses.” Vivien Greene (wife of novelist Graham Greene), who lives in Oxford, was the first to inform me—later Mrs. Henry A. Morss, Jr., of Massachusetts, sent similar information—that what was called a “treacle well” actually existed in Carroll’s time in Binsey, near Oxford. Treacle originally referred to medicinal compounds given for snakebites, poisons and various diseases. Wells believed to contain water of medicinal value were sometimes called “treacle wells.” This adds of course to the meaning of the Dormouse’s remark, a few lines later, that the sisters were “very ill.”
The Annotated Alice Page 12