The Mad Hatter
I've been having trouble finding something to write about lately and I'll be heading to Michigan for a week on Thursday and will be unable to write much. I've decided to give my readers a bit of useless information to entertain them before my "uncooked" blog about Christmas.
Did you know that the fictional character; The Mad Hatter encountered in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is based on a real person... or, more specifically, real people?
Hatters (people who made hats) in the 1800's often used mercury to cure felt. They would breathe these fumes (unintentionally) and, over time, the mercury would build up in their system. This, in turn, caused neurological damage and muscular tremors. Eventually they would develop confused speech and even hallucinations and psychotic symptoms. No one really knew mercury was toxic at these times so people just saw this odd trend of hat makers going insane.
The expression "Mad as a Hatter" was a term in use 30 years before Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland.
Tagged with: Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, Mad Hater, Mercury
1 Comments
In fact, I did know that. Did you know that the Hatter in the story has none of the symptoms of mercury poisoning? Although the conditions of hatters in the 1800s coined the term 'mad as a hatter', it's more likely that whoever the Hatter was based off of wasn't actually a hatter.
Neat, huh?
Posted on 10/12/08 | Reply
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