T
here was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter
1
were having tea at it: a Dormouse
2
was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”
The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming. “There’s plenty
of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.
“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.
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“I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.
“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.
“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice
angrily.
“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.
“I didn’t know it was your
table,” said Alice: “it’s laid for a great many more than three.”
“Your hair wants cutting,”
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said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.
“You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some severity: “it’s very rude.”
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said
was “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
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“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is
the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.
The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.
Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”
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“Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!” he added, looking angrily at the March Hare.
“It was the best
butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.
“Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”
The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the best
butter, you know.”
Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a funny watch!”
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she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!”
“Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does your
watch tell you what year it is?”
“Of course not,” Alice replied very readily: “but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.”
“Which is just the case with mine,
” said the Hatter.
Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand you,” she said, as politely as she could.
“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.
The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, “Of course, of course: just what I was going to remark myself.”
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
“Nor I,” said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.”
“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.
It’s him
.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.
“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”
“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied; “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”
“Ah! That accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He wo’n’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”
(“I only wish it was,” the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)
“That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully; “but then—I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”
“Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.”
“Is that the way you
manage?” Alice asked.
The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We quarreled last March—just before he
went mad, you know—” (pointing with his teaspoon at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing
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‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!’
You know the song, perhaps?”
“I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.
“It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—
‘Up above the world you fly
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle—’ ”
Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep “Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle—”
and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop.
“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the Queen bawled out ‘He’s murdering the time!
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Off with his head!’ ”
“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.
“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he wo’n’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time,
10
and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”
“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.
“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”
“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal.
“Then the Dormouse shall!” they both cried. “Wake up, Dormouse!” And they pinched it on both sides at once.
The Dormouse slowly opened its eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” it said in a hoarse, feeble voice, “I heard every word you fellows were saying.”
“Tell us a story!” said the March Hare.
“Yes, please do!” pleaded Alice.
“And be quick about it,” added the Hatter, “or you’ll be asleep again before it’s done.”
“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie;
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and they lived at the bottom of a well—”
“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.
“They lived on treacle,”
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said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.
“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked. “They’d have been ill.”
“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very
ill.”
Alice tried a little to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much: so she went on: “But why did they live at the bottom of a well?”
“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—”
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’
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—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.
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“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!”
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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 summer 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.
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.
Mavis Batey, in Alice’s Adventures in Oxford
(A Pitkin Pictorial Guide, 1980), tells the eighth-century legend of the Binsey well. It seems that God struck King Algar blind because he pursued the princess Frideswide with the intent to marry her. Her prayer to Saint Margaret for mercy on the king was answered by the appearance of a well at Binsey with miraculous waters that cured Algar’s blindness. Saint Frideswide returned to Oxford, where she supposedly founded a nunnery at the spot where Christ Church now stands. The treacle well was a popular healing spot throughout the Middle Ages.
An amusing instance of the earlier meaning of treacle
is provided by a famous “Curious Bible” printed in 1568 and known as the Treacle Bible. (Curious Bible
is a generic term for Bibles that contain peculiar printer’s errors or strange choices of words made by an editor. In the King James Bible, Jeremiah 8:22 begins: “Is there no balm in Gilead . . . ?” In the Treacle Bible it reads: “Is there not treacle at Gilead?”
In the Latin Chapel of Christ Church Cathedral, a stained-glass
window (reproduced in color in Mrs. Batey’s booklet) depicts a group of ailing persons on their way to the Binsey treacle well.
