You may remember the Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the 1865 book by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Dodgson. When Alice encounters the Hatter at a tea party, he continually interrupts her, and finally exasperates her with his bizarre logic and increasing hostility, leaving Alice “dreadfully puzzled.” After some time, she gives up and stomps away from “the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!”
Critics and history suggest that Dodgson’s fictional Hatter may have been inspired by a non-fictional, real-life person. One candidate, according to The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner, polymath and popularizer of mathematics, is Oxford furniture dealer Theophilus Carter, who was said to wear a top hat all the time. Carter, whom Dodgson probably knew (since Dodgson lived and taught at Oxford University), was regarded locally as the Mad Hatter, most likely because of his eccentric ideas.
