Thank You for that fact, Mr. Green

It’s ironic that I ended up spending nearly 40 years teaching in Wales because I suppose it was almost a case of taking coals to Newcastle. In the 1970s many of my teachers in Elthorne High School in Hanwell, Ealing were originally from Wales. Some of them I remember very fondly, like the late Gwilym Morris who saw me safely through my Maths O Level and some of them not at all fondly but I shan’t mention their names in order to protect the guilty. Most though were somewhere in between these two poles. Such a teacher was Mr. Green.

Mr. Green was one of those teachers who you absolutely loved to have covering your class, but he wasn’t to my mind quite as good when you had him as a regular teacher. When you had him covering your class he could and would go off on a tangent and would tell you about some really interesting things. When he was teaching a regular Physics class he tended to go by the book and that was nowhere near as interesting.

I remember him starting off one such cover class by explaining that the romans used to clean their teeth with urine. Quite a barnstormer of a fact to begin a History class with, that one. This led him onto the use of urine in dyeing and then the use of mercury by hatmakers which explained, he said, why Lewis Carroll included a Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland”.

I think I’ve explained before just how the book captivated me at an impressionable age, so I shan’t go on all about that again now. I’ve just said that Lewis Carroll included a Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland” but that is not strictly speaking true. Lewis Carroll included a mad hatter (check out the lack of capitals) in “Alice in Wonderland”. For Carroll himself never uses the epithet The Mad Hatter in the narrative. He calls him the Hatter and leaves you to make your own mind up about his sanity or otherwise.

Here’s something you may already be aware of, in which case, apologies. The first person to illustrate any version of “Alice in Wonderland” was (drumroll please ) Lewis Carroll. He wrote the stories he had made up on an 1862 boat trip with the Liddell girls and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth in manuscript form calling it “Alice’s Adventures Underground”. He showed it to a friend called George Macdonald who had children and sought advice on publishing it. They were all very enthusiastic but advised Carroll that it might be a good idea to get a professional artist to illustrate them.

Carroll gave the manuscript to Alice Liddell in November 1864 as a Christmas present. It’s now one of the treasures of the British Library. So how did Carroll draw the Hatter? Well, the answer is that he didn’t. “Alice’s Adventures Underground” is considerably shorter than “Alice in Wonderland” and the Hatter was added to the story later for the published version. So the first person to illustrate the Hatter was actually (Sir) John Tenniel and it’s his conception of the Hatter that is probably what comes to mind whenever you hear the phrase “The Mad Hatter”. I’m not an expert but it seems to me that everyone who illustrates the Alice books now is faced with a difficult choice when it comes to the Hatter – to either take inspiration from Tenniel, or to react against Tenniel and go for something drastically different.

Personally although when it comes to a whole set of illustrations I’m very much in the Tenniel camp, I do also like the way that Mervyn Peake depicted the character too.

Well, I can’t finish with a song so I’ll have to finish with a question. Most people know that the price ticket inside Tenniel’s Hatter’s topper says 10/6. But what else does it say? Highlight below this line to check your answer.

In this style.